tideshift

Declarations of Independence, Declarations of Interdependence

2007-05-03T20:56:00.000-04:00

Borrowing the phrase from SatireWire, tideshift has landed. I'm doing a local blog with a global perspective at www.cnnorthplainfield.blogspot.com. I haven't stopped reading and thinking about the desperately grim outlook for the human species, but I'm also trying to look at the world situation a bit more from a Buddhist perspective of life and death being aspects of one another, suffering and joy bound up in each other, similar to the Heraclitean views I've always found so compelling, since way back in my Philosophy undergraduate days:

"This world did none of gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everliving fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures."

Thanks for reading, enjoy the archives, and here are two last thoughts, one from Thomas Jefferson, for our particular plight here in America...

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred. to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

...And one from Henry David Thoreau, On Civil Disobedience:

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe --"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have...

When Others Were Silent

2007-04-28T11:40:00.000-04:00

Video of Kucinich.

Kucinich Has Done It

2007-04-24T21:46:00.000-04:00

H.R. 333.

Articles of Impeachment against Cheney. With massive supporting documentation.

Introduced in Congress by Dennis Kucinich.

The American Ghosts of Abu Ghraib

2007-04-21T23:11:00.000-04:00

The American Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
By Sam Provance
Consortium News
Tuesday 27 March 2007

Former Army Sgt. Sam Provance was one of the heroes of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the only uniformed military intelligence officer at the Iraqi prison to testify about the abuses during the internal Army investigation. When he recognized that the Pentagon was scapegoating low-level personnel, he also gave an interview to ABC News.

For refusing to play along with the cover-up, Provance was punished and pushed out of the US military. The Pentagon went forward with its plan to pin the blame for the sadistic treatment of Iraqi detainees on a handful of poorly trained MPs, not on the higher-ups who brought the lessons of "alternative interrogation techniques" from the Guatanamo Bay prison to Abu Ghraib.
The Congress, which was then controlled by the Republicans, promised a fuller investigation. Provance submitted a sworn statement. But Congress never followed through, leaving Provance hanging out to dry. Then, in February 2007, he went to a special screening of the documentary, "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," and learned more than he expected about why the scandal died:

For those of you who have not heard of me, I am Sam Provance. My career as an Army sergeant came to a premature end at age 32 after eight years of decorated service, because I refused to remain silent about Abu Ghraib, where I served for five months in 2004 at the height of the abuses.

A noncommissioned officer specializing in intelligence analysis, my job at Abu Ghraib was systems administrator ("the computer guy"). But I had the misfortune of being on the night shift, saw detainees dragged in for interrogation, heard the screams, and saw many of them dragged out. I was sent back to my parent unit in Germany shortly after the Army began the first of its many self-investigations.

In Germany, I had the surreal experience of being interrogated by one of the Army-General-Grand-Inquisitors, Major General George Fay, who showed himself singularly uninterested in what went on at Abu Ghraib.

I had to insist that he listen to my eyewitness account, whereupon he threatened punitive actions against me for not coming forward sooner and even tried to hold me personally responsible for the scandal itself.

The Army then demoted me, suspended my Top Secret clearance, and threatened me with ten years in a military prison if I asked for a court martial. I was even given a gag order, the only one I know to have been issued to those whom Gen. Fay interviewed.

But the fact that most Americans know nothing of what I saw at Abu Ghraib, and that my career became collateral damage, so to speak, has nothing to do with the gag order, which turned out to be the straw that broke this sergeant's back.

After seeing first-hand that the investigation wasn't going to go anywhere and that no one else I knew from the intelligence community was being candid, I allowed myself to be interviewed by American and German journalists. Sadly, you would have had to know German to learn the details of what I had to say at that time about the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Later, Republican Congressman Christopher Shays, who was then chair of the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations, invited me to testify on Feb. 14, 2006, so my sworn testimony is on the public record. [See: www.humanrightsfirst.info/pdf/06214-usls-provance-statment.pdf]

On June 30, 2006, dissatisfied with the Pentagon's non-responsiveness to requests for information on my situation, the Committee on Government Reform issued a subpoena requiring then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to produce the requested documents by July 14. I heard nothing further. I guess he forgot. I guess Congress forgot, too.

Thanks largely to a keen sense of justice and a good dose of courage on the part of pro bono lawyers and congressional aides, I made it through the next two and a half years of professional limbo, applying my computer skills to picking up trash and performing guard duty. Instead of a prison sentence, I was honorably discharged on Oct. 13, 2006 and began my still-continuing search for a place back in the civilian world.

Producers for Rory Kennedy's documentary "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib" were among the journalists who interviewed me - discreetly - in Germany. On Feb. 12, 2007 I attended a screening of that documentary. What happened there bears telling.

Surreal Event

Walking into the fancy government building to see the documentary proved to be a bizarre experience. Hardly in the door, I saw a one of the guests shaking his head, saying in some wonderment, "The young woman at the front desk greeted me with a cheerful smile; Abu Ghraib? she said. Right this way, please."

The atmosphere did seem more appropriate for an art show than a documentary on torture. People were dressed to the nines, heartily laughing, and servers with white gloves were walking about with wine and hors d'oeuvres.

I managed to find one other person who was also in the film, former Gen. Janis Karpinski, with whom I shared the distinction of having been reduced in rank because we refused to "go along to get along."

I had wanted to talk to her ever since the abuses at Abu Ghraib came to light. We've been on the same page from the beginning. She seemed happy to meet me as well, but so many others wanted her attention that serious conversation was difficult.

Everyone shuffled into the theater and Gen. Karpinski's and my presence there was announced briefly during the introductions. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the showing was to be followed by a discussion led by Sen. Edward Kennedy (who was there from the start) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (who arrived only after the introductions).

It was largely because of the interest that Sen. Kennedy took in the Army's retaliation against me that I escaped the Army's full wrath for truth telling. And Sen. Graham initially had approached me when he heard of my situation, not even realizing at the time that I was from South Carolina. So I was looking forward to what I expected would be an unusual bipartisan challenge to the practice of torture.

Flashback

When the lights dimmed and the documentary started, I began to be affected more emotionally than I had expected.

It was the words of the other soldiers that touched me most deeply, because I could relate to them; I knew those soldiers on one level or another. I got worried I might not make it through the screening, that I would break down right there.

Ironically, it was my anger at their plight that kept me composed. Everything in the film was all too familiar to me. The soldiers explaining they were just following the orders of their supervisors; the higher-ups vigorously shifting blame from themselves onto soldiers of lesser rank - the whole nine yards.

And to see those Iraqi faces again - the broken hearts and ruined lives of innocent Iraqi citizens detained, abused, tortured. And the systematic cover-up, with the Army investigating itself over and over again, giving the appearance of a "thorough" investigation.

After the film, Senators Kennedy and Graham took seats on the stage to begin their discussion. I was shocked to see it descend into heated debate.

Sen. Graham began saying things that I couldn't believe I was hearing. He made a complete 180-degree turn on the issue of torture from when I had spoken to him on the phone not long after the Abu Ghraib scandal was exposed.

Now he was portraying Abu Ghraib as a place where only a handful of soldiers resided (you've heard of them, the so-called "rotten apples)." I felt betrayed.

Worse still, the only officer Graham saw fit to criticize (he assumed in absentia) was Gen. Karpinski. And he laid it on thick, asserting forcefully that she should have been court-martialed because she was the reason things went awry.

The senator argued that Karpinski (who was responsible for overseeing 17 prisons with military police, most of whom had not been trained in detention operations) should have driven from her headquarters to Abu Ghraib for random middle-of-the-night checks. He then saw fit to contrast her behavior with what Graham described the due diligence he exercised nightly as an Army lawyer in checking the "dormitory." (sic)

...and sick. Anyone who knows much about Abu Ghraib knows that all kinds of Army brass lived and worked there, and that it was host to visits by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, U.S. pro-consul Paul Bremer, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, Gen. Geoffrey Miller (in charge of "Gitmo-izing Abu Ghraib), Gen. Barbara Fast, and even National Security Council functionary Frances Townsend.

They were all there. I don't know how many, if any, saw fit to check the "dormitory."

Torture Works?

During the discussion/debate, Sen. Graham seemed to be speaking in support of virtually everything that we opposed - and that had been exposed in the documentary - throwing all reason out the window. He dropped a bombshell when he began defending the practice of torture itself, using the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as an example. He cited the "good stuff" gleaned from treating him that way, as if to say, "it works!"

This raised again the question in my mind about just what kind of person professionally tortures somebody, and what kind of mentality would approve of it? (I found myself almost wishing such people could hear the screams - almost, because I would not wish that on my worst enemy.)

The obvious answer is: Sadists. Which is what the administration called the military police in the infamous photographs. And what was seen in them was small stuff compared to what else happened - and continued to happen even after the abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed.

Benjamin Thompson, a former U.S. Army specialist at Abu Ghraib, has told Reuters that exposure of the scandal "basically diverted everyone's attention away from anything that was not in the photographs ... as long as we didn't stack people and make pyramids, we were doing a great job."

This reminds me of my wonderment at President George W. Bush's public advocacy last fall of the "alternative" interrogation procedures in what clearly is one of his favorite CIA programs. Perhaps better than others I can imagine what has been tucked under the rubric of "alternative" techniques, the alleged success of which the President has advertised and has been picked up in the captive corporate media.

At one point Sen. Graham asked the audience who among us considered Army specialist Joe Darby a hero. Darby was the one who initially gave the Abu Ghraib photos to Army investigators. Pausing just a few seconds, Graham used the momentary silence as a cue to continue talking about how the American people really don't care about torture.

For me, the worst part is that I have found this to be generally true. It is more convenient for people not to care. By and large, they are far more prepared to accept official explanations than to take the trouble to find out what is really going on. For, if they found out, their consciences might require them to do something about it.

Sen. Graham's demeanor was downright eerie in the way he chose to relate to the crowd ... beaming with a kind of delight and mocking the outrage that he must have seen building.

This reminded me of my experience in Iraq, where I would hear soldiers discussing their abuse of detainees. It was always cast as a humorous thing, and each recounting won the expected - sometimes forced - laugh.

But now I am in Washington, I thought. Has everyone been bitten by the torture bug? I was sickened to watch a senior senator and lawyer flippantly dismiss what happened at Abu Ghraib, and act as though he knew more about the abuses than the people, like me, who were there.

Sadly, Graham is not the first elected official who has become part of the problem rather than the solution.

Audience Unrest

Unrest was spreading in the audience to the point where some were threatened with ejection. People were yelling at Sen. Graham from all over the theater and for a moment I thought a riot might ensue.

But Sen. Kennedy's response pierced the darkness with the white-hot light of truth. Clearly, he was just as uncomfortable as most of the rest of us at what we had just witnessed, and he spoke in a straightforward way against what is just plain wrong.

For me, his comments came in the nick of time. I was beginning to feel not only betrayed, but a little crazy. Was this really happening? Later, I was happy to be able to shake Sen. Kennedy's hand as he left the theater.

At the end, producer Rory Kennedy brought a portable microphone to Gen. Karpinski where she sat in the audience and, directing her attention back to the stage, explained to Sen. Graham that Karpinski was present and that it seemed only fair to give her a chance to comment on his remarks about her.

She rose and, in quiet but no uncertain terms, accused Graham and the general officers involved in Abu Ghraib of "cowardice." Then she noted that as a South Carolinian she intended to work very hard to ensure that he would not be the senior senator beyond January 2009.

As to the merits of his charges against her, Gen. Karpinski revealed that she had actually pressed hard to be court-martialed and to appear before a jury of her peers, to get the whole truth up and out. She explained that the Army refused her request, presumably because a court martial might jeopardize the Pentagon's attempt to restrict blame to the "few bad apples."

Graham was initially taken somewhat aback, but he recovered quickly. He offered no apology. Rather, he attempted to trivialize what had just happened with the jovial remark, "Well, I guess I lost your vote!" Smirk. Smirk.

Make that two votes.

Afterwards, it was back to high-society small talk and wine, while I looked for someone to really talk to. A reporter who has been covering the issue from the start sought me out and told me something that made me want to cry.

"You know we've talked over the years and I have followed your case, but I just want to tell you that I have found everything you've said to me all along to be true."

For so long people have tried so hard to discredit either me or my testimony. Now the dust had settled for a moment; it was encouraging to know the truth can still stand tall.

I ended up hanging out with Janis Karpinski and later walking her to the Metro station. I gave her a big hug and told her I'd always be her soldier. Then, as she went down the escalator I saluted her, and she returned my salute.

"Thank you," she said. "Anytime, General!" I replied. Anytime.

Blowback?

2007-04-16T20:25:00.000-04:00

We'll have to wait and see if the shooter is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the point is: violence condoned at the highest levels of cultural hierarchy encourages violence throughout the culture.

Establishment Rethinking Globalization

2007-04-13T20:31:00.000-04:00

Job losses of 10 million or more...

Easter Lily

2007-04-10T21:04:00.000-04:00

It smells so nice.

Thanks Mom.

Visuddhimagga

2007-04-10T14:12:00.000-04:00

Suffering alone exists, none who suffer;
The deed there is, but no doer thereof;
Nirvana is, but no one seeking it;
Path there is, but none who travel it.

Rich Man, Poor Man, Blah Blah Blah

2007-04-06T22:07:00.001-04:00

A Matter of Scale

2007-04-02T21:13:00.000-04:00

Bill Moyers' speech, published at Common Dreams, excerpt:

Despite Thomas Jefferson's counsel that we would need a revolution every 25 years to enable our governance to serve new generations, our structure - practically deified for 225 years - has essentially stayed the same while science and technology have raced ahead. A young writer I know, named Jan Frel, one of the most thoughtful practitioners of the emerging world of Web journalism, wrote me the other day to say: "We've gone way past ourselves. I see the unfathomable numbers in the national debt and deficit, and the way that the Federal government was physically unable to respond to Hurricane Katrina. I look at Iraq; where 50% of the question is how to get out, and the other 50% is how did so few people have the power to start the invasion in the first place. If the Republic were functioning, they would have never had that power.

Yet the inertia of the political process seems virtually unstoppable. Frel reminds me that the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee can shepherd a $2.8 trillion dollar budget through the Senate and then admit: "It's hard to understand what a trillion is. I don't know what it is." Is it fair to expect anyone to understand what a trillion is, my young friend asks, or how to behave with it in any democratic fashion?

He goes on: "But the political system and culture are forcing 535 members of Congress and a President who are often thousands of miles away from their 300 million constituents to do so. It is frightening to watch the American media culture from progressive to hard right being totally sold on the idea of one President for 300 million people, as though the Presidency is still fit to human scale. I'm at a point where the idea of a political savior in the guise of a Presidential candidate or congressional majority sounds downright scary, and at the same time, with very few exceptions, the writers and journalists across the slate are completely sold on it."

Jan Frel is dead-on right, which is why I think part of the upheaval/realignment of these next few decades will be all about decentralization - a fragmenting of the U.S. into more manageable parts with far more regional control by citizens. That, or a military dictatorship with martial law. The official military may be too tired or disinclined to participate in such a project, but Blackwater mercenaries probably wouldn't. -KW

Beyond Hope

2007-04-01T16:10:00.001-04:00

An essay by Derrick Jensen.

Why We Went to War

2007-03-31T16:57:00.001-04:00

New Voices for a New War

2007-03-29T19:49:00.000-04:00

Katherine Pryor's essay, posted at CommonDreams, again browbeats young people for presumed apathy in the face of the national and international crises confronting us.

My response, posted at the essay and here:

Check out the generational theories of Neil Howe and William Strauss - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss_and_Howe

In particular, it’s important that young people - Generation X and Millenials - be aware that we are NOT the same as our Boomer parents and elder siblings. Within the Strauss/Howe analysis, we have a very different role to play - Gen Xers, as “Nomads, are ratty, tough, unwanted, diverse, adventurous, and cynical about institutions. They grow up as the underprotected children of an Awakening, come of age as the alienated young adults of an Unraveling, become the pragmatic, midlife leaders of a Crisis and age into tough, post-crisis elders during a High…”

As a Gen Xer, active in social justice, I expect to spend my time working very hard but in the shadows of public life, preparing the ground for the Millenial “Heroes: conventional, powerful, and institutionally driven, with a profound trust in authority. They grow up as the increasingly protected children of an Unraveling, come of age as the Heroic, team-working youth of a Crisis, become energetic and hubristic mid-lifers during a High and become the powerful elders who are attacked in the next Awakening. The G.I. Generation that fought World War II is an example of a Hero generation.”

I don’t know how well the Boomers are doing at their “wise elder” stage, but Kucinich might be an example of that. Anyway, don’t knock us young people too hard. We can’t relive the past; similar as the current times may be to the Vietnam era, there are many, many significant differences.

NJ Occupation Project on BlueJersey

2007-03-29T13:24:00.000-04:00

I've been working with the NJ Occupation Project a little bit, planning for the actions Tuesday and today around Senators Lautenbergs and Menendez' votes on the war funding.

Five activists were arrested at the Gateway Center on Tuesday. More likely to be arrested today. The link goes to a post at BlueJersey called "Don't Free the Newark Five."

My response, posted there and here:

Impasse

I participated in several of the organizing meetings for the New Jersey Occupation Project, aka the Newark Five, and loaned them one of the bells they've used to punctuate their readings of the names of the dead, but I'm not writing on behalf of the group. These are my personal views.
I fully support what the group is doing, although when push came to shove I decided not to risk arrest, for both personal and political reasons.

During planning several purposes were discussed. Also,the planned series of events is not over. It began with delivery of the pledges to vote against further funding to both offices about 10 days ago, to be followed by Tuesday's visit to Lautenberg's office to insist upon a signed pledge, followed by a second visit tomorrow to Menendez' office for a similar sit-in action.

One purpose for the action is the hope - which almost all the NJ folks admit is far-fetched - that the Senators' awareness that people are willing to risk arrest to make the point that the war must end, might change the Senators' views and votes on the war and the funding of the war.
I think this view is espoused most passionately and articulately by the members of the Occupation group who represent Military Families Speak Out: large groups of MFSO people have already met with both Senators repeatedly and been given hollow assurances to "just trust me," while their loved ones have spent time in, are in, or may soon go back to, the bloody mess in Iraq. Their patience has run out.

A second purpose for the action is to broaden public awareness of 1) the brutal failure of the war, 2) Democratic ownership of the war, now that they have refused to filibuster (with 41 Senators) to end the war or stop funding the war with language like the Lee Amendment (CounterPunch has done good pieces on these options), and 3) the presence of a large and frustrated American majority who want the war and occupation and privatization stopped immediately and the troops brought home, not funding for another year or two, or three.

This public awareness is to be achieved in two ways: the actual visible and audible presence of the protestors in public places related to the Senators, and the generation of press coverage by the arrests.

One of my main concerns about the passage of last week's House bill - full funding with non-binding, unenforceable timetables and readiness provisions that can be overcome with a waiver - is that President Bush might not veto it after all, and then he'll have a whole lot more money to kill a whole lot more people and broaden the mess inside and beyond Iraq and Afghanistan PLUS expanded Democratic complicity; to me, it makes no sense to rely on the assurances of a crazy person - legislators who want the war over should vote to cut off the funding, period.

Another, strategic concern is that the media is just as vested in the continuation of the war as most of the Congress (although, as an aside, I think a real push to end the war and impeach Bush may bubble up from the Republican ranks sooner than from the Dems, because it's far more in the Republican's interest to cut the madman loose and begin rebuilding the party).

The problem, in the end, is that the media is so large and so intertwined with Congress that there appears to be no way for citizens to intervene in government policy-making and no way for citizens to go around the context and critical analysis blackout of the mainstream press. TomDispatch had a good essay on this the other day - the difference between the ultimately persuasive Vietnam activism, which still provides many of the models and participants for today's anti-war actions, and the current bipartisan political class's utter imperviousness to criticism and pressure from outside its own ideological fortress.

The Occupation Project is an authentic effort to chip away at both edifices, and as such, it's worthwhile. It's a part of the incesssant, persistent drip-drip-drip we all need to be dropping, in every imaginable way old AND new, to eat away at the foundations of both until they are either pushed in a far more accountable direction, or washed away through the convening of a new Constitutional convention or some other major nation-shaking event.

Erased, Invisible

2007-03-27T09:22:00.000-04:00

Tom Englehardt at TomDispatch, comparing the current antiwar potential with the Vietnam era. Excerpt from a longer essay well worth the read:

"Today, it crosses no young minds that the top officials in the White House might be listening. Many fewer young people, I suspect, have any remnant of that deep faith that our political system could be responsive to them or that anything they could do might change it. When they look to Washington, what they see is fraud, dysfunction, conspiracy, cronyism, cabal, influence-peddling, corruption, fear -- in short, a system, a world, beyond response, possibly beyond repair, and utterly alien to their lives. In such a situation, despair or apathy tends to replace anger and hope.

The Iraq demobilization, then, is certainly part of a larger demobilization, a deeper belief that, as Bill Moyers made vividly clear in a recent speech, your vote doesn't matter; that democracy is a-functional; that none of this has anything to do with you, or your ballot, or your feet, or your sign, or your shout...

...No wonder Americans have arrived at a series of striking conclusions on Iraq, but haven't done much about them. "

History of People's Movements - Class 3

2007-03-25T23:41:00.000-04:00

I. Discussion Topics:

A. Do you agree with the scholars who say the only proper people’s movements are movements that have sprung up since industrialization, in urban areas where many people of differing views can meet? Why or why not?

B. Do you agree with the idea that America is now at a historical moment when “the consent of the governed” has been violated, authorizing citizen revolt against the government? Why or why not?

II. American Revolutionary Era - A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. Chapters 4 and 5

Historical Context - British Acts (all synopses from Wikpedia unless otherwise noted):

Proclamation of 1763 “created a boundary line (often called the proclamation line) between the British colonies on the Atlantic coast and American Indian lands (called the Indian Reserve) west of the Appalachian Mountains…outlawed private purchase of Native American land, which had often created problems in the past…British colonists were forbidden to move beyond the line and settle on native lands, and colonial officials were forbidden to grant lands without royal approval…[it] gave the Crown a monopoly on all future land purchases from American Indians.”

The Stamp Act of 1765 …passed by the Parliament of Great Britain … required all legal documents, permits, commercial contracts, newspapers, wills, pamphlets, and playing cards in the American colonies to carry a tax stamp. The Act was enacted in order to defray the cost of maintaining the military presence protecting the colonies [and] to repay the suppliers from the French and Indian War, which had been very costly, even though Great Britain had been victorious in 1763…The Act passed unanimously on March 22, 1765, and went into effect later that year, on November 1. It met with great resistance in the colonies and was never effectively enforced. Colonists threatened tax collectors with tarring and feathering. Few collectors were willing to risk their well-being to uphold the tax. The Act was repealed on March 18, 1766. This incident increased the colonists' concerns about the intent of the British Parliament and added fuel to the growing separatist movement that later resulted in the American Revolution.

Townshend Taxes “placed a tax on common products imported into the American Colonies, such as lead, paper, paint, glass, and tea…not a direct tax, but a tax on imports and created three new admiralty courts to try Americans who ignored the laws. The impetus behind the Townshend Act was the large debt incured by Great Britain during the French and Indian War, the logic being that since Britain had spent so much blood and treasure defending the American Colonies, it was only proper that they bear a large portion of the financial burden. The Acts led to outrage among the colonists and helped spark the Liberty seizure and riots of 1768. The colonists's opposition to these acts was well stated in the phrase "No taxation without representation," originally spoken by James Otis. Smugglers avoided the taxes by importing illegal goods and by organizing a boycott of the legitimate imports. Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty of Boston were notable supporters of this boycott. Economic pressure from the boycott caused several entities in Britain to press for repeal. Eventually, John Dickinson (1732-1808) raised support to repeal the Townsend Acts by a series of 12 essays entitled "Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania," addressing himself as "A Farmer". The only act remaining was the tax on tea. …designed to protect the British East India Company's tea trade by exempting it from three-pence tax on tea, undercutting the prices of other importers which led to adverse economic consequences for the American colonists and the Boston Tea Party.”

Stationing of Troops – “In 1768, the Commissioners of Customs, who acquired their jobs in Britain and drew their pay from what they collected in America, were so intimidated by the resistance they met in Boston that they demanded military protection. Boston's fifteen thousand or so residents were clearly the worst malcontents on the North American continent. It was imperative that they be put in their place. General Thomas Gage (Commander In Chief of the British Army in America) agreed and ordered the regiments … in all about 700 men -- arrived from Ireland to protect the men who collected customs duties for the King of England. To the people of Boston the coming of the troops was outrageous. They had been fighting for years against infringement by Britain of their right to tax themselves.”
http://www.bostonmassacre.net/plot/detailed1.htm

“The Boston Massacre was an attack on colonist civilians by British troops on March 5, 1770 and its legal aftermath, which helped spark the American Revolutionary War. Colonists were already resenting the Townsend Acts. Tensions caused by the heavy military presence in Boston led to brawls between soldiers and civilians, and eventually to troops shooting their muskets into a rioting crowd.”

“The Boston Port Act is an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain which became law on March 31, 1774…A response to the Boston Tea Party, it outlawed the use of the Port of Boston (by setting up a barricade/blockade) for "landing and discharging, lading or shipping, of goods, wares, and merchandise" until such time as restitution was made to the King's treasury (for customs duty lost) and to the East India Company for damages suffered…it closed Boston Port to all ships, no matter what business the ship had. As Boston Port was a major source of supplies for the citizens of Massachusetts, sympathetic colonies that extended as far as South Carolina sent relief supplies to the settlers of Massachusetts Bay. This was the first step in the unification of the thirteen colonies.”

“The Massachusetts Government Act …became a law on May 20, 1774…did away with elections for the councilors and assistants in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, making the positions appointive, the appointments to be made by "his Majesty's commission, under the great seal of Great Britain", the positions to be held "during the pleasure of his Majesty". This left the colonists helpless against patronage and corruption. Before the creation of "the Act", the Council possessed the power to veto or nominate officials.”

Historical Context – Colonial Responses

The Stamp Act Congress was a meeting in New York City in October 1765 of delegates from the American Colonies that discussed and acted upon the recently passed Stamp Act. The meetings adopted a Declaration of Rights and Grievances and wrote letters or petitions to the King and both houses of Parliament. This Congress is viewed by some as the first American action in or as a precursor of the American Revolution.The Declaration of Rights raised fourteen points of colonial protest. In addition to the specifics of the Stamp Act taxes, it asserted that only the colonial assemblies had a right to tax the colonies; Trial by jury was a right, and the use of Admiralty Courts was abusive;…without voting rights, Parliaments could not represent the colonists.”

“The Sons of Liberty was a label adopted by Patriots in the Thirteen Colonies before the American Revolution. British authorities and their supporters considered the Sons of Liberty as seditious rebels, and referred to them as "Sons of Violence" and "Sons of Iniquity." Patriots attacked the apparatus and symbols of British authority and power such as gentlemen's homes, Customs officers, East India Company tea, and, as the war approached, vocal supporters of the Crown. The Sons of Liberty wanted to resist the British Crown with acts of protest, however they did not want mob violence.”

“A committee of correspondence was a body organized by the local governments of the American colonies for the purposes of coordinating written communication outside of the colony. These served an important role in the American Revolution and the years leading up to it, disseminating the colonial interpretation of British actions between the colonies and to foreign governments. The committees of correspondence rallied opposition on common causes and established plans for collective action, and so the network of committees was the beginning of what later became a formal political union among the colonies.”

Boston Tea Party - The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 angered colonists regarding British decisions on taxing the colonies despite a lack of representation in the Westminster Parliament. One of the protesters was John Hancock. In 1768, Hancock's ship Liberty was seized by customs officials, and he was charged with smuggling. He was defended by John Adams, and the charges were eventually dropped...Hancock organized a boycott of tea from China sold by the British East India Company, whose sales in the colonies then fell from 320,000 pounds (145,000 kg) to 520 pounds (240 kg). By 1773, the company had large debts, huge stocks of tea in its warehouses and no prospect of selling it because smugglers such as Hancock were importing tea without paying import taxes. The British government passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea to the colonies directly, thereby allowing them to sell for lower prices than those offered by the colonial merchants and smugglers…. The first of many ships carrying the East India Company tea was the HMS Dartmouth arriving in late November 1773…On Thursday, December 16, 1773, the evening before the tea was due to be landed, on a signal given by Samuel Adams, the Sons of Liberty thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, left the massive protest meeting and headed toward Griffin's Wharf, where lay the HMS Dartmouth and her newly arrived, tea bearing, sister ships the HMS Beaver and the HMS Eleanour. Swiftly and efficiently casks of tea were brought up from the hold to the deck, reasonable proof that some of the "Indians" were, in fact, longshoremen. The casks were opened and the tea dumped overboard; the work, lasting well into the night, was quick, thorough, and efficient. By dawn 90,000 lbs (45 tons) of tea worth an estimated £10,000 had been consigned to waters of Boston harbor. Nothing else had been damaged or stolen, except a single padlock accidentally broken and anonymously replaced not long thereafter. Tea washed up on the shores around Boston for weeks…”

First Continental Congress “Like the Stamp Act Congress, which was formed by colonials to respond to the unpopular Stamp Act, the First Continental Congress was formed largely in response to the Intolerable Acts. The Congress was planned through the permanent committees of correspondence. They chose the meeting place to be Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in Carpenters' Hall, which was both centrally located and one of the leading cities in the colonies…The Congress had two primary accomplishments. First, the Congress drafted the Articles of Association on October 20, 1774…forming a compact among the colonies to boycott British goods, and to cease exports to Britain as well if the “Intolerable Acts” were not repealed. The boycott was successfully implemented, but its potential at altering British colonial policy was cut off by the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775. Its second accomplishment was to provide for a Second Continental Congress to meet on May 10, 1775…”

Declaration of Independence: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation… We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness…That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Zinn’s Hypothesis: The American Revolution was not in the immediate interests of most of the colonists; it was mostly a means for the ruling elite that had sprung up in the colonies to acquire the power held by the British Royal appointees. The leaders of the Revolution successfully channeled popular unrest and anger at the class divisions that separated poor farmers, laborers, servants, etc., from wealthier merchants, tradesmen, and professionals of both American and British allegiance, to advance the interests of the colonial upper class using the energy, passion and lives (in battle) of the colonial lower class against the British ruling class. It was difficult at times – mobs whipped up by colonial orators successfully attacked British warehouses, officials’ homes, etc., but the leaders became concerned that the mobs would then turn their attention to wealthy colonial property and privileges. Thus, the need to co-opt and redirect that energy and growing class consciousness toward throwing off British rule while keeping prevailing property and power distribution intact for the post-war nation.

“The military conflict itself, by dominating everything in its time, diminished other issues, made people choose sides in the one contest that was publicly important, forced people onto the side of the Revolution whose interest in Independence was not at all obvious. Ruling elites seem to have learned through the generations – consciously or not – that war makes them more secure against internal trouble.” (People’s History, p. 79)

History of People's Movements - Class 2

2007-03-25T23:36:00.000-04:00

I. Review: working definition of a people’s movement: a social and political movement initiated and carried out by ordinary people, not by government or military leaders, aiming to change public policy and public actions to improve the lives of the majority of people in the society, not gain privileges for a few elite members of the society.

II. Examples:

Jesus’ political work confronting the power of the Roman governing elite;

Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, John Brown and others who led the slave revolt and abolitionist movements;

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and others who led the women’s movement, building on their work with the abolitionist and temperance movements;

Mohandas K. Gandhi’s work to gain India’s independence from Britain;

Martin Luther King Jr.’s work to create the Civil Rights Movement in America to end segregation and bring about racial equality (1960s);

Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Movement (1960s);

American Indian Movement, including the Trail of Tears challenge to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1970s);

Chipko Movement in India, in which women formed circles around trees (tree huggers) to prevent them from being cut down (1970s);

Lech Walesa and the Gdansk, Poland shipworkers strikes; playwright Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia, who both led movements undermined Communist control in Eastern Europe (1970s, 1980s).

Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s work to end apartheid in South Africa (1980s); Ken Saro-Wiwa’s work to gain Nigerian independence from multinational oil corporations (1990s);

The work of the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia, to regain control over their water supply from Bechtel corporation (2000s);

The global justice movement, launched in America during the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle, WA to confront the power and priorities of the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Economic Forum. See also Jose Bove, French farmer.

III. The Politics of Jesus, by Obery M. Hendricks, Jr.

Chapter 4 – Messiah and Tactician: The Political Strategies of Jesus - “The goal of Jesus was realization of the kingdom of God. The kingdom (or sovereignty) of God was a new world order of transformed human relationships; it was social, economic and political relationships in this world made holy.”

1. Treat the People’s Needs as Holy – The Lord’s Prayer; public rejection of the legitimacy of the Temple priesthood; refusal to accept kingship offered to him; primacy of the need for food (daily bread) and for debt relief for the poor; injunctions to care for fellow human beings in need.

2. Give a Voice to the Voiceless – Overturning the moneychangers tables and symbolically occupying the Temple; the Temple was a religious and political hub of Jerusalem, where the priestly aristocracy represented Roman rule and extorted dues from the working people to enrich themselves; the action showed the people that their awe of the priests as mediators to God was misplaced, and to demonstrate the ability of ordinary people to confront those who abused power and abdicated responsibility.

3. Expose the Workings of Oppression – The parable of the Householder and the Workers, in which those who start at the end of the day get the same as those who work all day. Hendricks’ interpretation is that Jesus was telling his followers that even though landowners insulted them and exploited their labor, knowing they could not negotiate for better wages and working conditions, in the kingdom of God, they would be treated fairly and respectfully. Jesus undermined the idea that the wealth of the wealthy was a natural, God-given right and that the poverty of the poor was their fault, in a political system that granted all the rights to the wealthy and none to the poor.

4. Call the Demon by Name – The parable of Jesus cleansing the possessed man of the unclean spirit. Hendricks’ interpretation is that the unclean spirit was a metaphor for Roman occupation, the possessed man a symbol of the oppressed people of Israel; and the story an indictment of the Roman’s role in tearing Israeli society apart.

5. Save Your Anger for the Mistreatment of Others – The parable of the leper being healed by Jesus, in which Jesus becomes angry. Hendricks argues that many translations of Jesus’ deeds soften the meaning of the original Greek. In this story, Jesus anger is often left out: anger not at the leper or at the leprosy disease that afflicted so many, but at the priests who demanded payment for or outright refused to reintegrate people into society even after their skin disorders (often not leprosy) had cleared up. “…[W]e must endeavor to love everyone, but we must also take sides.” (Politics of Jesus, p. 165)

6. Take Blows Without Returning Them – Turning the other cheek, giving the cloak, going the extra mile. Hendricks’ interpretation is that Jesus was not advocating simple passivity, but rather active demonstrations of full humanity, “because by taking an action, the powerless and the oppressed became more than victims; they became actors who asserted their humanity, their somebodyness…Even if those who were dominated were struck again, it was on their own terms; they had dictated the action…” (Politics of Jesus, p. 169-170)

7. Don’t Just Explain the Alternative, Show It.- Loaves and Fishes. Jesus didn’t just talk to his followers about sharing with those who have less, trusting in the generosity of God, etc. He acted on his beliefs and injunctions about power, love, charity, and justice, demonstrating an alternative, “redefining their relationship to God and to each other as based on gift instead of debt.” (Politics of Jesus p. 181)

Petah Lucia

2007-03-23T10:59:00.000-04:00

Congress: 1-866-340-9281

2007-03-17T10:30:00.000-04:00

(I am going on Internet hiatus for the next week. Will try to post again on 3/24. -KW)

"All the Democratic majorities in Congress have to do is condition the funding for the Iraq war with the words,

"No funds may be obligated or expended except for the withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq, and for such force protection actions as may be necessary during that withdrawal."

If Bush vetoes the bill, he vetoes continued funding for the war. If he signs the bill, ignores the legislative language and keeps fighting the war in the same old way, he sets himself up for impeachment."

-William S. Lind at Counterpunch

Women on the Op-Ed Pages

2007-03-16T11:30:00.001-04:00

Willful Blindness

2007-03-16T11:13:00.000-04:00

I begin to profoundly understand how Hitler got away with doing what he did. The Germans said they didn't see what was happening, so they couldn't stop it. America is engaged in the same willful blindness right now.

Here's a FlickFilosopher movie review of The Pianist and three other Hitler films, excerpted:

It's the slow building of the Nazi oppression that lends a hint of understanding as to how they got away with their crimes. If the Nazis had started rounding up Jews and other "undesirables" the day they marched into Warsaw, there'd likely have been a huge outcry. But when the persecution starts out as minor inconveniences, it doesn't seem so bad.

Though you want to cry out for Szpilman and his family and friends to resist right from the beginning -- we know now that wearing gold stars isn't just an indignity but a softening up for greater horrors to come -- it's sadly understandable why they submit, complaining, yes, but willingly.

And when each step on the climb from inconvenience to genocide hardly seems worse than the previous one... The Pianist builds slowly but inexorably toward what is inevitable only with our historical hindsight, and the film's great power is in showing us how the inevitable wasn't obvious at the time.

And in that power, the film serves as a potent admonition for us today, living in a political climate defined by the PATRIOT Act and Total Information Awareness, that oppression must be fought at every step lest we become desensitized to it until it's far too late to do anything about it.

Sapere Aude

2007-03-16T11:08:00.000-04:00

From Wikipedia: "Sapere aude is a Latin phrase meaning "Dare to know" or "Dare to be wise", or sometimes translated as "Have courage to use your own reason."

It is the school motto for the Tiffin Girls' School in Kingston-upon-Thames, UK, where my mother went to school. Thanks, BW.

Get the State Legislatures to Filibuster

2007-03-15T22:10:00.000-04:00

(Sent via e-mail today. I got the 2006-2007 Legislative Roster, and spent a couple of hours figuring out how to put the addresses into a giant 120-person list. -KW)

Dear Senators, Assemblymen and Assemblywomen:

I am a 33-year-old writer, wife and mother of two, living in North Plainfield NJ. I'm also a pacifist, and have been working since well before the catastrophe in Iraq began, to try to prevent it from beginning and then stop the bloodshed.

With my fellow peace activists all across America, I helped elect a Democratic Congress in Nov. 2006, not because the electorate wholeheartedly endorses all the traditional Democratic platform planks (hell, the Democratic Party doesn't even endorse things like health care, education and worker rights anymore) but because the electorate believed that the people who got us into the mess in Iraq - Republicans under Bush - were not willing or able to get us out and the Democrats were the only alternative. Plus, the Democrats said they would get us out.

As an aside, I should mention that my father was a lifelong Goldwater Republican until Bush drove the country into the ground, causing him to vote a straight Democratic ticket in Nov. 2006. I'm smart enough to know that good politics requires a balance between individual rights and responsibilities and collective rights and responsibilities, and that, in the absence of perfect knowledge, good faith debate leading to good faith compromise is the best way to achieve that balance. I'm also smart enough to know that the balance is currently totally out of whack, with all the rights belonging to the wealthy few, and all the responsibilities being borne by the rest of us.

Now, the Congressional Democrats are failing us. It's not totally unexpected. They promised to end the war, but keeping the war going will be better for their election chances in 2008, and looking only two years down the road, focused on their own political future, occupies most of their time, energy and passion.

For reference, see William S. Lind's article at Counterpunch:

A few excerpts:

"...The only way to support the troops when a war is lost is to end the war and bring them home. Nor is it a challenge to design legislative language that both ends the war and supports the troops. All the Democratic majorities in Congress have to do is condition the funding for the Iraq war with the words, "No funds may be obligated or expended except for the withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq, and for such force protection actions as may be necessary during that withdrawal." If Bush vetoes the bill, he vetoes continued funding for the war. If he signs the bill, ignores the legislative language and keeps fighting the war in the same old way, he sets himself up for impeachment. What's not to like?

For the Democrats, what's not to like is anything that might actually end the war before the 2008 elections. The Republicans have 21 Senate seats up in 2008, and if the Iraq war is still going on, they can count on losing most of them, along with the Presidency and maybe 100 more seats in the House. 2008 could be the new 1932, leaving the Republican Party a permanent minority for twenty years. From the standpoint of the Democratic Party's leadership, a few thousand more dead American troops is a small price to pay for so glowing a political victory.
Ironically, the people who should be most desperate to end the war are Congressional Republicans. Their heads are on the chopping block. But they remain so paralyzed by the White House that they cannot act even to save themselves...

...The likely result of all this Washington dodging is that events on the ground in Iraq and elsewhere will outrun the political process. That in turn means a systemic crisis, the abandonment of both parties by their bases and a possible left-right grass roots alliance against the corrupt and incompetent center. In that possibility may lie the nation's best hope."

I also recently learned that one Senator, with 40 supportive Senators, could filibuster to stop the war. Check it out here.

So, I’m writing to you to suggest a filibuster in the New Jersey Legislature to stop the war. Refuse to carry on the work of the state until the feds wake up and start cleaning up the huge messes they’ve made. One state could lead to a national revolt against unresponsive leaders in both national parties; Vermont is working its way in that direction, and maybe other states are too. In any case, without a movement from below, the war will drag on for no apparent reason, and I think both political parties and the country as a whole will suffer greatly from that course of action.

On a separate but related issue, I understand the NJ Legislature has given up on reforming the school funding/property tax issue for this year. I attended an Abbott District forum in Plainfield last fall, and came up with the following set of proposals. I pass them along in case you might find them useful in reframing your understanding of what governments can and should do, as far as resource distribution is concerned.

Politically, I’m more or less a communitarian (no, not a communist). The communitarian viewpoint holds that social networks, not individuals, are the cornerstone of healthy societies; that communities provide their members with the basic necessities of life; that there is such a thing as the public good, which calls upon stronger members of society to care for weaker members; and that everyone has positive rights to such things as food, housing, education, health care, safety and a clean environment.

In other words, members of a society have significantly better lives than individuals who live alone in the woods, and therefore all citizens can reasonably be required, non-violently, to make meaningful contributions to the public good from whatever resources in time, energy and money remain after providing a basic living for themselves and their dependents. From that communitarian perspective, I propose:

Federal Taxes: New Jersey should opt-out of the federal tax program, on the grounds that, as Founding Father James Otis said: “taxation without representation is tyranny,” and the federal government, from Congress to the President to the federal judiciary, is failing to provide and protect access to the basic public services Americans need and deserve.

Property Ownership: Revalue every home in New Jersey at $120,000 – about three times the average annual per capita income ($41,626) – and turn the deeds over from the banks to the homeowners: no more mortgage payments.

Property Taxation: For owner-occupied property, collect property taxes at one-half the national average rate. For non-owner-occupied property, collect property taxes at three times the national average, to provide incentives for home-ownership, and disincentives for the hoarding of affordable shelter.

Wages: The minimum wage for a 35-hour workweek in New Jersey should be raised to $30,000 per year. A maximum wage should be established, at $100,000 per year.

Personal Income Taxation: Do not tax individual income up to the state average of $41,636. Tax all individual income over the state average at 95%. (There is precedent for this – during the World War II era, personal income over $400,000 was taxed at 91%; it’s currently taxed at 35%).

Corporate Income Taxation: Tax all corporate profits at 95%.

Accumulated Personal and Institutional Wealth: Personal fortunes should be taxed at 95% upon the death of the individual, and non-financial incentives should be offered for those who voluntarily return their fortunes to their communities before their deaths. Institutional endowments should be managed to continually reinvest the proceeds in programs and services, not to accumulate more wealth for accumulation’s sake.

State Budget: Immediately release all non-violent offenders from state prisons, and abolish the costly death penalty, replacing it with life in prison without possibility of parole.

Local Budgets: Move ahead with consolidating nearby school districts and municipalities to cut administrative costs, provide non-financial incentives for strong citizen oversight to improve accountability, and ensure that citizens of each community still have relatively easy access – by foot, bicycle or bus – to public services.

Prioritize all state revenue to support public-private-nonprofit partnerships, with extensive volunteer citizen management, fully supported by employers through flexible schedules to accommodate employee participation at civic meetings, that provide:

Public Education: day care, preschool and kindergarten through bachelor’s degree, plus continuing adult education for all ages; well-supported public libraries;

Public Health: universal basic health care (nutritional and community garden programs, annual check-ups and routine sick-care for all ages, vaccinations, prenatal and maternity care, drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs);

Public Safety: emergency services such as police, fire and EMS departments; environmental protection and renewable energy programs; public works, parks and recreation programs;

Public Pensions: guaranteed stipends ensuring an adequate, not luxurious, standard of living for all retirees and disabled workers;

Public Transportation: improve and expand bus, train and van-pool programs, bicycle and walking paths.

How to Back Bush Into a Corner

2007-03-15T13:27:00.000-04:00

William S. Lind at Counterpunch:

"...The only way to support the troops when a war is lost is to end the war and bring them home. Nor is it a challenge to design legislative language that both ends the war and supports the troops. All the Democratic majorities in Congress have to do is condition the funding for the Iraq war with the words, "No funds may be obligated or expended except for the withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq, and for such force protection actions as may be necessary during that withdrawal." If Bush vetoes the bill, he vetoes continued funding for the war. If he signs the bill, ignores the legislative language and keeps fighting the war in the same old way, he sets himself up for impeachment.What's not to like?...

...The likely result of all this Washington dodging is that events on the ground in Iraq and elsewhere will outrun the political process. That in turn means a systemic crisis, the abandonment of both parties by their bases and a possible left-right grass roots alliance against the corrupt and incompetent center. In that possibility may lie the nation's best hope."

We're Angry

2007-03-15T13:16:00.000-04:00

My husband and I, progressive parents looking at all this shit day in and day out, and then looking at our kids, trying to do something to help fix the broken things and clean up the messes, and then looking at all this shit some more, are also tired. Very, very tired. - KW

All The Rage
By Paul Waldman

We can’t deny it any longer. There’s no point in hiding it, no point in trying to explain it away. Yes, it’s true: We progressives are angry. And we no longer care if the centrist, moderate guardians of the establishment scold us for it.

Our anger is not just some vague feeling whose source we can’t put our finger on. It isn’t based on absurd conspiracy theories and it isn’t illogical.

We’re angry because of what has happened to our country, because of how we’ve been treated, and because of the innumerable crimes the conservatives have committed. We’re angry at the president, we’re angry at the Congress, we’re angry at the news media. And we have every right to be.

Yes, we’re angry at George W. Bush. We’re not angry at him because of who he sleeps with, and we’re not angry at him because we think he represents some socio-cultural movement we didn’t like 40 years ago, or because he hung out with a different crowd than we did in high school. We’re angry at him because of what he’s done.

It’s true, we don’t like the fact that the most powerful human being on the planet is such a ridiculous buffoon that he can’t put two coherent sentences together without beginning to giggle and shimmy his shoulders. But we’re not angry because we think he’s stupid, we’re angry because he treats us as though we’re stupid. We’re angry that he lied to us, and lied to us and lied to us again. We’re angry that when he lies to us it isn’t because he’s caught up in scandal or got caught doing something he shouldn’t have, it’s part of a carefully constructed plan to fool the public.

Yes, we’re angry about Iraq, and we may be for the rest of our lives. We get angry every day when we open our newspapers and see the photo of another young soldier who died for this, another one maimed for life, another one with a tormented and broken soul. We’re angry about the couple of trillion dollars this war will cost. We’re angry about the thousands of young men around the world have been driven into the arms of al Qaeda, who have decided to devote their lives to killing Americans because of this war. We’re angry about the thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who have died in the orgy of bloodshed we unleashed, and the living too, those whom we said we were coming to “liberate,” but who now find themselves in a suffocating, endless miasma of fear and misery and death.

We’re angry that when we talk about ending this monstrous war, the soulless hypocrites who are glad to send more and more men and women to be scarred and maimed and killed in Iraq have the gall to accuse us of not “supporting the troops.” We’re angry that people whose actions exhibit nothing but contempt for freedom and liberty and justice, who wouldn’t know real patriotism if it came up and smacked them across the face, pin a little flag on their lapel and say that we’re the ones who hate America.

We’re angry because people who said the Iraqis would greet us as liberators, who said Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were good buddies, who said this nightmare of a war would bring a flowering of democracy across the Middle East—this band of idiots, the Kristols and the Krauthammers and the Kagans and the Kondrackes, is treated as “serious” and “credible” on matters of national security, while those of us who were right about the war are dismissed as some sort of fringe whose ideas are too silly to listen to.

We’re angry that America may now be the only country in the world in which torture is an officially sanctioned policy, proclaimed proudly in public. We’re angry that in our name prisoners are subjected to sleep deprivation, water boarding and other forms of psychological torture to the point where they are literally driven mad. We’re angry that the president has decided, over 750 times, that if Congress passes a law and he doesn’t like it, he’ll just ignore it. We’re angry that this administration has argued over and over, in public and in court, that if the president does it, it’s not illegal. We’re angry that they tell us we have to shred our freedoms in order to be safe, and that so many of our fellow citizens shrug their shoulders and think it’s no big deal.
And we’re angry that Bush has made our nation so hated around the world. We’re angry that the next time a Democrat gets elected, most of their time will be spent cleaning up the god-awful mess Bush has made of everything.

We’re angry that we and our children and our grandchildren will have to keep paying off the nation’s debt, which now stands at nearly $9 trillion. We’re angry because every other industrialized country in the world has a single-payer health care system that works, and we pay more for ours than any of them, yet we have 45 million people with no health insurance.

We’re angry that the insurance companies have convinced their obedient servants in Congress that the Rube Goldberg perpetual paperwork machine we have now is somehow “the best health care in the world” and preferable to a system in which you go to your doctor, get treated and go home, without having to fill out 10 forms and get down on your knees before the gods of the HMO bureaucracy to get a partial repayment minus your deductible and your co-pay.

We’re angry that the federal government is brimming with people fundamentally opposed to the mission of the agencies over which they preside, the anti-environmentalists who run the Interior department, the mining company lobbyists in charge of mine safety and the union-busters in charge of worker safety. We’re still angry about Hurricane Katrina, that our government left thousands of its citizens stranded to suffer and die, while the president thought that the guy presiding over the disastrous failure was doing a heckuva job. We’re angry that our government sends religious fundamentalists around the world to discourage condom use, thus condemning untold numbers of people to unwanted pregnancy, disease and death.

We’re angry that forty years after the Voting Rights Act, the Republican Party continues to exploit racism and do everything in its power to stop black people from voting in each and every election. We’re angry that in the richest country in the world we can’t seem to find our way to a system in which you go to the polls, cast your ballot and know that it will be counted. And yes, we’re still angry about what happened in Florida in 2000, that through lying and cheating and pure luck the Republicans were able to steal a presidential election, and five unprincipled partisans on the Supreme Court helped them do it. We’re angry that every time we look at Al Gore all that pain and frustration and outrage comes bubbling up through our guts no matter how hard we try to “get over it.”

We’re angry that some of the most powerful people in America see nothing wrong with getting down on their knees to kiss the rings of radical clerics espousing a theology as maniacal as any on earth. We’re angry that we have to endure lecture after lecture on “family values” from people who rush from their pulpits, whether in church or in Congress or on cable chat shows, to a motel room to give in to their desires and revel in their transgression before rushing back to those pulpits to wag a finger in all our faces with talk of sin. We’re angry that people whose souls are so twisted by hate and shame they make John Winthrop look like Wavy Gravy have the nerve to tell us how to live “moral” lives.

We’re angry that when some pompous fool who less than a decade ago demanded that Bill Clinton be impeached in order to demonstrate our fealty to the “rule of law” comes on television to explain how Scooter Libby’s perjury and obstruction of justice mean nothing and he must immediately be pardoned, Wolf Blitzer doesn’t say, “Get out of this studio, you contemptible hypocrite, and don’t ever come back.”

We’re angry because a repellent ghoul like Ann Coulter can regularly advocate the murder of people with whom she has political differences, yet continue to get invited on the Today Show. We’re angry that journalists who ought to know better tut-tut progressive bloggers for using dirty words but don’t blink an eye when conservatives spew forth the most abominable hatred and calls for violence that one could imagine.

We’re angry that there is not a single show on cable news in which a progressive is given an hour to spout off his or her opinions, but that privilege is given to the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and John Gibson and Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough and all the other two-bit electronic hucksters of phony aggrievement.

We’re angry because snake-oil salesmen like William Donohue— despite being an anti-Semitic homophobe —can issue a press release expressing patently phony outrage about something somebody said, and get the mainstream press to jump like trained dogs. We’re angry because a band of liars like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth can hoodwink the media into doing their dirty work for them. We’re angry because every despicable Republican attack gets recycled as knowing, arched-eyebrow commentary by “mainstream” commentators.

Those are a few of the things we’re angry about, and yes, that’s a lot of anger. But you know what? There’s nothing wrong with being angry. Anger is the appropriate reaction to moral outrages, to crimes against our common humanity, to the actions of those who would turn our country into something twisted and ugly.

41 to Filibuster the War

2007-03-13T16:44:00.000-04:00

Today I got a message urging me to call my Senators at 1-866-340-9281 to urge them to vote for Sen. Harry Reid's S.J.Res. 9, which would set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

A few hours later, I got another message, from a member of the NJ Occupation Project, with this John Walsh article from Counterpunch:

"We should start now to talk about filibustering for the saving of lives and of our country."
John Kerry

That is a direct quote from John Kerry. Unfortunately it is from April, 1971. Now Senator Kerry will not go so far as to vote against the supplemental appropriations to end the war. In a conference call with the Smedley Butler Brigade, the Boston Chapter of Veterans for Peace, Kerry refused on Tuesday to vote against the Supplemental Appropriation for the War on Iraq. It is possible with only 41 Senate votes to filibuster the war to an end, as pointed out on February 8 here in CounterPunch. Although there are 51 Democrats in the Senate, not one Senator has stepped forward to fight for such a filibuster. Meanwhile Americans and innocent Iraqis die every day in Iraq.

But John Kerry is simply one of the ugliest examples of the Democrats' complicity in the war. And that complicity reflects the complicity of much of the "official" peace movement. Let's look at the facts. In October 2002, the Democrats controlled the Senate when the Iraq resolution came up. 23 Senators, including one Republican, Lincoln Chafee, voted against it. Right there it could have been stopped. 18 more votes would have sustained a filibuster and the resolution would have been dead.

But those 18 votes did not emerge. Why? Because every Democratic Senator facing a close election in the very next month or harboring presidential ambitions voted in favor of the resolution. The only exception of which I know was the late Paul Wellstone. Daschle and Cleland voted for the resolution and they lost their races anyway, defeats they richly deserved.

And of course John Edwards and John Kerry and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, all with presidential ambitions, voted for the war. Kerry compounded his criminality by running on a prowar platform in 2004. It is interesting that the polls had a majority turning against the war late in October of 2004 just before the election, but Kerry had locked himself into his bellicose stance and lost. Think about that. John Kerry consciously decided to climb to the presidency atop a mountain of Iraqi and American corpses. To make amends for that crime, a simple apology will never be enough.

So the Democrats gave Bush his war for the sake of their ambitions, precisely what Rove and AIPAC were counting on. And year after year Bush came along with requests for supplemental funding. And each year the Democrats provided the votes. But the Dems were not in the majority, say "Progressive" Democrats of America and some in the leadership of United for Peace and Justice.

In fact that is why those folks urged us to vote for Dems in 2006. But in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 the Democrats had 41 votes in the Senate, giving them the power to end the war in any of those years. They never even tried. And now they have 51 votes, a majority and much more than they need to filibuster against the war appropriations. And still they will not so much as raise the issue of the filibuster. It has been the Democrats' war all along; it was from the start; and it is so in spades today.

The root cause is not spineless Dem politicians but a spineless official peace movement.
Now dear reader, if you are part of the "mainstream" peace movement, represented by United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), for example, do not start to mutter to yourself about spineless Democratic politicians. For the fault lies not in our politicians, but in ourselves. Let us remind ourselves that twice in two weeks, the avowedly prowar Senators, mainly Republicans, filibustered against a toothless non-binding anti-war resolution against the war. Why? Their base demands it. Theirs is not a spineless base, and so they are not spineless legislators.

But in over four years the supposedly antiwar Democratic Senators did not even raise the idea of a filibuster. Why not? In part because their base did not demand it. Not once was it raised to my knowledge. What does the mainstream or "official" antiwar movement, as it more properly should be called, do? Does it demand or does it grovel? Quite frankly it grovels at most. The Dem politicians are spineless in part, because we are.

Whenever a UFPJ group goes to "lobby" the Congressmen or Senators, the unwritten rule (violated by the present writer on many occasions) is to "make nice".' Do not risk weakening the "relationships" with legislators and staff is the mantra. It is all carrot and no stick. And what are the results? No filibuster. Continued war. And from first hand experience, when one threatens the legislator with supporting another candidate in the coming election, a pained look comes over the UFPJ "facilitator," and one can rely on being tut-tutted into silence.

But take this a step farther. The Democratic politicians know full well that there is no stick.
"P"DA can be relied on to support the most retrograde of Democratic candidates in the end as can "progressives" like Dennis Kucinich.

In fact without a third party, there is no stick. Ralph Nader is right on this point. The Democrats will never change unless they face an electoral challenge. It is time to build that challenge. And it is time for more of us to get involved in movements like the Occupation Project. We must refuse to leave the offices of Senators until we have obtained written pledges to vote against the war and to join a filibuster. The time is late.

So 45 Democratic senators will co-sponsor a withdrawal plan to kick in sometime in a year or so, but none of those will do what it takes to end the damn war RIGHT NOW.

Conscience and the War

2007-03-13T13:50:00.000-04:00

"...It is true that an upsurge of violence may occur when the United States departs, but that will be so whether the departure is sooner or later, the essential difference being that many more people--Americans and Iraqis--will die in the interim. In reality, widespread killing in Iraq will never end until the US-led occupation ends and one side or the other in the civil war, deprived of foreign occupiers to provide resources or incite more enemies, finally prevails or both settle for a compromise. The Iraqi people seem to agree. In surveys taken last year, large majorities favored an immediate US withdrawal; and nearly 80 percent believed it would reduce the violence in their country..."

Divide and Conquistador

2007-03-10T21:39:00.000-05:00

I wondered what he was up to...

Making It Up as We Go Along

2007-03-10T21:08:00.000-05:00

So, I'm starting to get ready to teach the first class (Monday) of "The History of People's Movements." I'll be making it up as I go along. Much as I wanted to back in November, I didn't manage to get the whole thing mapped out ahead of time. But the Politics of Jesus book by Obery Hendricks was a good start, as is the Wikipedia entry on Social Movements, and this paper on "What Works" from researchers in Vancouver.

I've also been listening to Ani DiFranco songs from the library, inspired by watching the 1998 Elmopalooza video with my daughter, in which Shawn Colvin sings a nice song -- "I would like to visit the moon.../But I wouldn't want to live there..." -- with Ernie. That reminded me that I like Shawn Colvin, so I looked for some of her albums and that reminded me of Ani:

Millenium Theater

...millenium spectacle
everybody put on a show
slip the little prince in the back door
21st century here we go
digital whiplash
so many formats so little time
while out in tv nation
under darkening skies
the resistance is just waiting
to be organized

halliburton enron
chief justices for sale
yucca mountain goddesses
their tears they form a trail
patriarchies realign
while the ice caps melt
and new orleans bides her time
new orleans bides her time...

Half-Assed

...spring is super in the supermarkets
and the strawberries prance and glow
never mind that they're all kinda tart and tasteless
as strawberries go
meanwhile wild things are not for sale
anymore than they are for show
so i'll be outside, in love with the kind of beauty
it takes more than eyes to know...

Like those geese, walking on the frozen pond today, near where we live.

Who Will Be Left Behind?

2007-03-07T09:54:00.000-05:00

This links to an article about how the U.S. occupiers will decide which among their Iraqi supporters to bring back to America, when the occupation ends. Troubling.

I know the war must be stopped, and that the troops are inflaming the situation, and also that the civil war will not stop immediately upon American withdrawal, and, in fact, it's likely Iran and Syria and Turkey will step into the vacuum and a wider Middle East war will probably ensue, and that, in turn, will probably draw in other nations until it's a world war, which it already is.

But how to quickly limit and turn off that future bloodletting is the question, which always brings me back to the fact that you can't speak against war while participating in it, and you can't advocate other ways of being with people without living those beliefs and building the networks they will need for support and effective action.

The story also reminded me of Robert Fisk's remarks about how the whole war would have gone differently if the U.S. had offered every Iraqi citizen the option to become an American citizen as soon as Baghdad fell (the first time) in May 2003, as the Romans made all their conquered people Roman citizens. I don't know my history well enough, and have only the impression that Roman brutality outweighed Roman expansiveness as far as citizenship, but I think Fisk is probably right.

If the Iraqis were American citizens, with full citizenship rights, things would be better than the almost incomprehensible mess they are now. Because extrapolating that policy out and applying it to everyone, as one must when analyzing the morality and efficacy of any policy, would make all the world's people truly entitled to the same rights held, albeit imperfectly, by every American citizen right now. Maybe they would feel, at first, like a new form of colonial victims, and that America had simply annexed territory by proxy citizens. But it's likely the empowering ideas of America's actual Constitution and Bill of Rights would quickly take hold, and support organized popular self-determination movements.

We're either headed that way, or toward complete hand-to-hand combat all over the world. So I keep working toward spreading the empowerment and sense of shared future, and toward undermining the alternative of power concentration and sense of every man for himself alone. And I hope they'll bring a lot of the Iraqis here.

Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi

2007-03-04T13:26:00.000-05:00

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy;

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Chalmers Johnson on Democracy Now

2007-03-03T22:57:00.000-05:00

My parents have been reading The Sorrows of Empire. Chalmers Johnson talked about his latest book, Nemesis, on Democracy Now last week.

The Politics of Jesus

2007-03-03T22:43:00.000-05:00

In preparation for the course on "The History of People's Movements" that I'll be teaching soon, I've been reading The Politics of Jesus by Obery M. Hendricks, Jr.

Excellent book. I plan to get a paperback copy to give to Rep. Mike Ferguson.

Kucinich in Newsweek

2007-02-28T14:05:00.000-05:00

Interviewer: Short of winning, what are other goals you hope to achieve with your bid? Do you hope to influence the candidates to move in your direction?

Kucinich: It must be very difficult to be in a situation where you’re called upon to determine here in February who the next president’s going to be and then who it’s important to talk to and who it’s not important to talk to. Let me explain something. Since you called me, and you’ve given me this time, which I’m grateful for, I’m going to tell you that I expect to be elected. And I expect to be elected because people will learn that I’ve been right all along and that I’ve stood for the truth. I’m not a rookie in politics. Because I’ve been doing this for a while, I understand that ideas sometimes take awhile to catch hold. But I will tell you that the idea of peace is the most powerful idea in America today…. I think that we’re in a whole new era where we need to pursue human relations as a science and stop using deadly force to try to change things.

Boycott

2007-02-28T13:48:00.000-05:00

Impeach 07

2007-02-28T13:47:00.000-05:00

Ferguson and the Status Quo

2007-02-27T22:19:00.000-05:00

On February 24, Congressman Mike Ferguson held an open house at his Warren office. During his brief meeting with me and another local activist, he repeatedly insisted that he is “totally dissatisfied” with the “status quo” in Iraq, and that his dissatisfaction led him to support President Bush’s troop “surge” and informed his “No” vote on H.Con.Res. 63, a resolution expressing Congressional opposition to both the surge and the more-of-the-same strategy behind it. Ferguson similarly expressed his dissatisfaction, and his support for the surge, in his Feb. 16 remarks to Congress during debate on the resolution.

The Democratic-sponsored resolution was non-binding, and therefore a tiny and inadequate first step – but a first step nonetheless – toward responding to the Iraqi peoples' passionate and well-documented desire for the Americans to get out, and the American electorate’s November demand that Congress end the war and bring the troops home.

The April appropriations bill will matter far more; money already appropriated in prior years can be used to end the war and bring the troops home, but cutting off future financing is the only way Congress can carry out its Constitutional duty, as a co-equal branch of government, to check the power abuses of the executive branch.

When I asked, Ferguson acknowledged he is aware of Congress’ equal power; that Congress has practical tools, including hearings, with which to exercise that equal power; and that the President is as bound to obey U.S. and international law as any other American citizen: that no one in a Constitutional democracy is above the law.

An interesting follow-up question for Mr. Ferguson is this:

“Given that the two most stable pillars of the status quo for the last four years have been blind obedience to Bush’s failed leadership and the inflammatory and deadly occupying presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, how will you reach your goal of changing the status quo by repeating obedient gestures toward Bush and adding more U.S. troops to Iraq?”

I think a better approach, for all members of the House and Senate, would be to ignore Bush, defund the war, and begin pulling the troops out immediately. There are several Democratic proposals to do just that, sponsored by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Rep. Barbara Lee, Rep. Lynn Woolsey, Rep. Jim McGovern and many others. If changing the status quo is Mr. Ferguson’s intention, I hope he’ll show more thoughtful and responsive leadership, by co-sponsoring one of those proposals.

Care Crisis

2007-02-23T14:09:00.000-05:00

Tony Benn on Democracy Now

2007-02-22T12:29:00.000-05:00

Tony Benn is one of Britain’s most distinguished politicians and the longest serving MP in the history of the Labour party...

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think protests matter? Do you think they have an effect?

TONY BENN: Well, after the big demonstration in London four years ago, at which I spoke -- there were two million people on the streets of London, the biggest demonstration in the history of Britain -- and then people said, “Oh, what did it do? Nothing happened. We went on with the war.” And then came the mid-term elections. And I think the peace movement must have played, in American opinion, a very large role in persuading the American voters to reject the Bush strategy. I was in the States a couple of years ago. And I’ve been over for the demonstration in New York about three years ago.

And, of course, the American peace movement is immensely powerful, and more significant because your mid-term elections and your new congress does allow that opinion to be expressed in a very effective way in terms of inquiries and whether to vote for funding, and so on. So, I mean, most people, including myself, look to the real America, which I love, to deal with this terrible problem created by the election of the neoconservatives, who believe that this is to be the American century. And I don't think that they were right. And I think a heavy price has been paid for their mistake...

Mose Allison

2007-02-20T09:42:00.000-05:00

My husband and I went to see Greg Brown in concert in Chatham NJ last weekend, and Greg Brown sang this Mose Allison song:

Ever since the world ended
I don't go out as much
People that I once befriended
Just don't bother to stay in touch
Things that used to seem so splendid
Don't really matter today
It's just as well the world ended
It wasn't working anyway

Ever since the world ended
There's no more Bible Belt
Remember how we all pretended
Goin' round lyin' 'bout the way we felt
Every rule has been amended
There's no one keepin' score
It's just as well the world ended
We couldn't have taken much more

Ever since the world ended
There's no more black or white
Ever since we all got blended
There's no more reason to fuss and fight
Dogmas that we once defended
No longer seem worthwhile
Ever since the world ended
I face the future with a smile

MoveCongress

2007-02-15T16:16:00.000-05:00

One-stop Congressional motivational planning...

Jane Jacobs

2007-02-14T14:12:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Jane Jacobs' 1961 book - The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It's odd how, so often, I try to read certain books for years, and can't get into them, and then, when the time is right in some unfathomable way, I suddenly find my interest sustained.

The book - a city planning broadside from a sociological/anthropological perspective - is relevant for me now as I continue to try to better integrate our middle class, white congregation into the poor neighborhood of color in which the historic church building stands. When I think about sharing the church - as so many congregations now do, as their memberships and revenues decline - I think of it as a way to enliven the whole neighborhood with the comings and goings of lots of different kinds of people who hold lots of different beliefs and have lots of different plans.

Reading Jane Jacobs gave me one of those "Ah-hah!" moments: others far more observant and experienced than I, have found that human bustle has infinite, immeasurable, intangible benefits, and that there is a broad spectrum of legitimate activities beyond the kinds of things our particular congregation may currently like to do.

Strangers become an enormous asset on the street on which I live [Hudson Street in Manhattan], and the spurs off it, particularly at night when safety assets are most needed. We are fortunate enough, on the street, to be gifted not only with a locally supported bar and another around the corner, but also with a famous bar that draws continuous troops of strangers from adjoining neighborhoods, and even from out of town. It is famous because the poet Dylan Thomas used to go there, and mentioned it in his writing.

This bar, indeed, works two distinct shifts. In the morning and early afternoon it is a social gathering place for the old community of Irish longshoremen and other craftsmen in the area, as it always was. But beginning in midafternoon it takes on a different life, more like a college bull session with beer, combined with a literary cocktail party, and this continues until the early hours of the morning. On a cold winter's night, as you pass the White Horse, and the doors open, a solid wave of conversation and animation surges out and hits you: very warming. The comings and goings from this bar do much to keep our street reasonably populated until three in the morning, and it is a street always safe to come home to. The only instance I know of a beating in our street occurred in the dead hours between the closing of the bar and dawn. The beating was halted by one of our neighbors, who saw it from his window and, unconsciously certain that even at night he was part of a web of strong street law and order, intervened.

A friend of mine lives on a street uptown where a church youth and community center, with many night dances and other activities, performs the same service for his street that the White Horse bar does for ours. Orthodox planning is much imbued with puritanical and Utopian conceptions of how people should spend their free time, and in planning, these moralisms on people's private lives are deeply confused with concepts about the workings of cities. In maintaining city street civilization, the White Horse bar and the church-sponsored youth center, different as they undoubtedly are, perform much the same public street civilizing service. There is not only room is cities for such differences and many more in taste, purpose and interest of occupation; cities also have a need for people with all these differences in taste and proclivity.

The preferences of Utopians, and of other compulsive managers of other people's leisure, for one kind of legal enterprise over others is worse than irrelevant for cities. It is harmful. The greater and more plentiful the range of all legitimate interests (in the strictly legal sense) that city streets and their enterprises can satisfy, the better for the streets and for the safety and civilization of the city.

Donate to Kucinich

2007-02-13T13:22:00.000-05:00

Letter from Dennis Kucinich:

Dear Friends,

This week, Congress will have another great debate about Iraq. Unfortunately, Congress is going to be discussing a nonbinding resolution at a time when Congress ought to be taking a stand to cut off funds, to implement a plan - my plan, the 12-point plan to get out of Iraq.

But instead, Congress engages in these meaningless resolutions. We need the Congress to take a stand, but we also need presidential candidates to take a stand. As you know, I led the effort in the House of Representatives in 2002, in challenging the Bush Administration's march towards war. As you remember, among all the presidential candidates today, I not only voted against authorization, but I voted against each and every effort to try to fund the war. The only way we stop the war is stop the funding.

Yesterday, 60 Minutes had a show which credited Senator Obama with being the only Democratic presidential candidate who opposed the war. The fact is that Senator Obama wasn't in the Senate at the time, he didn't vote against the war, and the fact is that, as a Member of the Senate, he's voted eight times to fund the war.

Now, I can't say the media is always going to tell the truth. But it's important for you to fund this campaign, so we can get our message out. It's important for you to fund this campaign so I can challenge Senator Clinton, who, in voting for the war and voting to fund the war, now says that if she's elected President, she'll end the war immediately, and, if she had been President at the time, we wouldn't have gone to war.

Now think about it. The role of Congress is superior to the President when it comes to war-making power. The role of Congress is to give the President permission to go to war. The Democratic Senate could have stopped the war. Senator Clinton, Senator Edwards gave George Bush permission and, in effect, made it possible for the war to occur.

It's good that, now, everybody thinks the war is a bad idea. But the real question the American people are going to have to face is who had the clarity, who had the vision, who had the judgment to make the call at that time that the war was not supportable, that there was no evidence that merited a war.

I stand before you, not only as the only candidate who can say that, but as the one who is prepared to lead this nation forward in the cause of peace, in the cause of a world where we use diplomacy to solve our differences.

We're at the threshold of a war with Iran, right now. The same people who were buying the drumbeat for war against Iraq are basically buying into the necessity of challenging Iran aggressively.

We need a whole new approach, and I'm prepared to take it, with your help. So go to the website right now. Please contribute if you haven't already done so. And if you have, thank you, and help us more. Do everything you can to contact your friends. America doesn't have to be in the position it's in. We're going to lose our nation unless we stand up and assert that war is not inevitable, that peace is inevitable if we stay with the truth and if we insist that our public officials stand up for the American people.

We have so many things that we need in our country today. Our children need better education. American people need health care. We need to create jobs. We need to work on focusing on cleaning up our environment. But our entire domestic agenda is being shoved aside in favor of war mongering. This has to stop. And you can help stop it.

Go to the website right now. Make your contribution. I'll stand in there for you; I need you to stand there with me.

Thank you,
Dennis J Kucinich

Flash-Frozen in Time

2007-02-11T14:38:00.001-05:00

Wallace Stevens

2007-02-08T14:06:00.000-05:00

The Well Dressed Man With a Beard

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket's horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would beEnough.
Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Amory Lovins

2007-02-08T13:52:00.000-05:00

Just read a profile of Lovins, an optimist in the global warming/fossil fuel depletion clamor, in the Jan. 22 New Yorker.

Wikipedia profile of Lovins here.

Other articles here and here.

Why I Am a Pacifist

2007-02-06T13:55:00.000-05:00

The Guardian article is called Children of War. A quote:

In a rare study published last week, the Association of Iraqi Psychologists (API) said the violence had affected millions of children, raising serious concerns for future generations...

...A regular commentator in the Iraqi media known for his ruthlessly honest comments about the Iraqi mindset, Dr. Hassan had worked with victims of trauma. And he had been determined to wean Iraqi youth from their obsession with the gun.

"It's all some of them think about and know," he had told the Guardian. "The dangers are they will internalise the violence and then reproduce it later."

...Shortly before his murder, Dr Hassan told the Guardian of his fears for Iraq's current young generation. "Do not make the mistake of blaming the occupation and the recent war for all of this," he said. "For more than three decades, young Iraqis have been forced to learn how to kill. We must now learn instead about dialogue and compromise. Otherwise, we will continue to produce psychopathic personalities for whom violence is simply a means of negotiating daily life."

The Horizon Project and Other Signs That Hell Is Freezing Over

2007-02-04T16:42:00.000-05:00

Coming on the heels of word that Bush has criticized Wall Street CEOs for unreasonable pay packages, Wal-Mart plans to lead the way to a new, greener future for commerce, and corporate heads are finally calling for near-universal health care, a group of corporate head honchos is even calling for fairer trade policies in light of global realities.

Methinks the powers-that-be are sensing the rising unrest of the population at large, and are making a late effort to tamp down the worst excesses from above, before widespread revolt bubbles up from below. -KW

...The report, released Thursday by the newly organized Horizon Project, called for a healthy economic nationalism, of the sort practiced by every other major trading nation save perhaps Britain. The test, the report argued, should be not what benefits US-based corporations but what is good for America -- its workers, communities, technology base, and ultimately its economy.

The analysis is astute -- read it at www.horizonproject.us -- but more remarkable are the report's signatories. The project was organized and signed by major corporate CEOs led by Leo Hindery, Jr., former CEO of AT&T Broadband and the cable giant TCI; and including Alfred Berkeley III, former president of NASDAQ; Leonard Schaffer, Founding CEO of WellPoint, the health insurance giant; and Bernard Schwartz, CEO of Loral, the high-tech defense and aerospace company. Another key leader, and intellectual inspiration of this effort, is Ralph Gomory, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and former chief scientist of IBM.

Contrary to the usual premise that the current trading system helps both America and its "trading partners," the report declares that globalization under present rules makes it easier for US multinational corporations to use cheap labor overseas and then import the finished goods back to the United States. "In the process they are building up the capabilities of the emerging Asian states and reducing the capabilities of the United States..."

The Occupation Project

2007-02-04T16:08:00.000-05:00

Explorers and Pioneers

2007-01-31T12:40:00.000-05:00

The other day my son asked me if there were any places in the world left to explore.

I said that I thought there were, but that many people believe the wild places are being lost, and that it would be better to leave as many wild places wild as possible, by not going there to explore.

But then I told him that I've been thinking about the American "pioneer" character - always pushing boundaries, looking for something new. It's derived, I suppose, from our cultural heritage from explorers and colonists. For those of us who are not indigenous, our sense of place is always about someplace other than where we are - either where we came from, or where we're headed next.

I don't think the pioneer outlook, as such, is a terrible one, although I hate the murderous, racist ways in which that drive to move on has played out across our national history.

Then I told him that I think that character trait, like the American hopefulness I posted about earlier this month, is actually exactly what is called for right now, and that I think he may well be an explorer, not of new places, but of new ways of living and being.

During a similar conversation, while walking him home from school a few weeks ago, I tried to explain the Gaia Hypothesis to him, that all of nature is a single living organism, capable of healing itself just the way humans and animals have immune systems to heal ourselves.

I pointed out the trees, as the lungs, and the brooks and rivers, like the blood system. Then he asked me: "Where are the eyes?" And I touched his eyes, and his little sister's eyes, and my own eyes, and said, "Right here." He is starting to get that humans are part of nature, but since it's so far from being a dominant theme in the culture as a whole, I think he gets some kind of cognitive dissonance problem when I say it.

So yesterday, the new issue of The Sun arrived, and the interview for February is with Richard Louv, talking about Nature Deficit Disorder, the virtual "house arrest" most children are being raised under, and the consequences of this phenomenon for personal, public and planetary health.

At the end, he talks about giving a speech to high school students:

I talked to these high-school students about the connection between their health and their direct experience of nature, and about how in the next forty years all our lives must change because of global warming and other environmental challenges. We'll need new kinds of agriculture, new kinds of urban design, new kinds of architecture, new sources of energy. Whole new professions will emerge, for which we don't even have names yet. When you frame the issue that way, young people can get excited about it.

After the students left, I asked the biology teacher who'd invited me to speak why he thought they'd been so attentive. He said it was simple: I'd said something hopeful about the future of the environment. They never hear that. The major message that comes through to kids is that it's too late for the environment. Why suit up for the game if it's already over? We need to change that message. As a journalist, I don't believe in printing happy news for its own sake. Nor do I think for a second we should pull back from printing bad news. But we should expand our message to say that we are facing not just a host of problems, but also a great opportunity.

So I'm going to keep talking to my son about strange new careers for inventors, as "recycling engineers." I'm going to tell him about my progress toward creating and implementing a coherent, comprehensive community gardening plan for my town and the city where my church stands.

I'm going to keep encouraging the bird-watching, and his new interest in finding animal tracks in the snowy backyard, to measure and identify. I'm going to let him play more outside.

And I'm taking both kids for a hike this afternoon - cold as it is out there.

Wendell Berry

2007-01-28T17:38:00.000-05:00

"When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

Middling is Not Fair

2007-01-28T17:20:00.000-05:00

This from a Common Dreams article by Glenn Hurowitz, on why Pelosi and Reid are courting disaster by refusing to stand up to Bush strongly as spokespeople for the left side of the American political spectrum:

...Moving to the middle also could turn off the millions of progressives who made phone calls, donated money and blogged for the Democrats in 2006. These progressives - and the organizations that represent them - do watch the issues very closely. If they don't see Democratic leaders moving aggressively for change, they could quickly become disillusioned, and start aiming their fire at Democrats not living up to their expectations, rather than focusing on, for instance, helping to oust Republicans from the White House in 2008.

If the Democrats are going to pander, they should at least pander to the progressives who care about their policies...

I agree, and not just because I am one of those millions of progressives. Well, probably mostly because of that. I'm sick of being taken for granted by the Dems, as they go on to enact legislation - or fail to stop legislation - in ways that totally go against my reasons for trying to help them get power to begin with.

Valentine's Day Gifts

2007-01-26T22:16:00.001-05:00

Media Benjamin to Congress: Listen Up.

2007-01-26T13:25:00.000-05:00

Forget Impeachment. Let's Have a New Constitutional Convention.

2007-01-25T21:14:00.000-05:00

I find myself in a strange political state of limbo these days.

I've been mulling impeachment for awhile, and supporting it, but I found Sanford Levinson's Nation article, against impeachment, really convincing.

I now think that, given the variety and scope of the problems, and the huge disconnect between citizenry and government, exacerbated by the ever-consolidating blackout media, what we need is a new Constitutional Convention, modelled on both the first convention back in 1787, and the cooperative, sustainable principles being carried forward by the World Social Forum, now in its seventh year.

Thomas Jefferson would approve. In fact, he'd say we're long overdue.

I just finished reading most of the November/December issue of Mother Jones, including an excellent comprehensive look at the environmental disasters confronting us all, and the evolutionary benefit, even necessity, of altruism and cooperation. The essay, by Julia Whitty, is called The Thirteenth Tipping Point.

The same Mother Jones issue had a fascinating article called "When Is a Corporation Like a Freed Slave?" by Barry Yeoman, who interviewed Thomas Linzey, "a brash 37-year-old attorney," who is the director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

Linzey, having fought on behalf of many communities trying to limit the environmental fallout from blind corporate monsters spewing filth from every orifice, has come to the conclusion that America needs a Constitutional amendment to explicitly strip corporations of the civil and human rights they've been granted by the US Supreme Court over the last century or so, with such disastrous consequences.

But I think the whole Constitutional edifice needs to torn down and rebuilt in light of what we've learned over the past two centuries about people, government, corporations and the Earth we live on.

I guess my limbo is somehow related to a sudden loss of direction now that the Democrats are allegedly "in power" and yet continuing to ignore the same elephants and further the same narrow interests. I didn't expect anything else, and have been focusing on local organizing for quite awhile anyway, because I'm convinced that, come the breakdown of electrical grids, oil supplies and federal agencies, we're all going to be needing our neighbors a lot more than our Congresspeople.

At the same time, my local organizing efforts took a big hit, when a simple but labor-intensive project to make a connection between relatively well-off white people and relatively poor Hispanic people ran aground on the shoals of racism, classism, anti-Christian bigotry and plain old-fashioned fear of change. Now there will be, as usual, more talk and less action, and I'm disappointed and frustrated: the picture I had in mind of what my work was about and where it fit into the overall scheme of preparing for a near future that will look significantly different from the consumptive and cancerous present, has grown somewhat fuzzy around the edges.

This too shall pass. I also just finished reading Sherman Alexie's novel Reservation Blues.

The novel, like everything else, turns on hope.

P.S. Alexie also wrote Smoke Signals, in case you're looking for a good indy movie.

Miracles

2007-01-23T13:22:00.000-05:00

I bought my son a birdfeeder for Christmas, because he's lately gotten interested in birdwatching and learning more about the natural world in general.

I hung the feeder outside the kitchen window of our second floor apartment about a month ago. No birds came. I put out some peanuts to entertain the squirrels and maybe attract birds. Peanuts disappeared. No birds.

Then yesterday, my son announced that birds were eating from the feeder, and ran to find his bird identification book. For an hour or so, the kids ate their peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches sitting at their little table, on the inside side of the window, and outside the window, the birds darted to the feeder to nip safflower seeds before fluttering back to the nearby tree branches to eat. Tufted titmouses. Redbreasted nuthatches. A downy woodpecker. A cardinal.

I had hoped, with the birdfeeder, to enlarge our sense of home, in some small way, to include a few feet of the great interconnected web of life outside, and to enlarge our sense of family to include some small, feathered, beaky folk.

But I had no idea how indescribably wonderful it would be to sit there watching those birds, and see them watching me.

Corporate Globalization Going Green?

2007-01-23T13:17:00.000-05:00

If Tesco and Wal-Mart are Friends of the Earth, Are There Any Enemies Left?

The superstores compete to convince us they are greener than their rivals, but they are locked into unsustainable growth

by George Monbiot in the Guardian

You batter your head against the door until you begin to wonder whether it is a door at all. Suddenly it opens, and you find yourself flying through space. The superstores' green conversion is astonishing, wonderful, disorientating. If Tesco and Wal-Mart have become friends of the earth, are there any enemies left?

These were the most arrogant of the behemoths. They have trampled their suppliers, their competitors and even their regulators. They have smashed local economies, broken the backs of the farmers, forced their contractors to drive down wages, shrugged off complaints with a superciliousness born of the knowledge that they were unchallengeable. For them, it seemed, there was no law beyond the market, no place too precious to be destroyed, no cost they could not pass on to someone else.

We environmentalists developed a picture of the world that seemed to be repeatedly confirmed by experience. Big corporations destroy the environment. They are the enemies of society. The bigger they become, the less they can be constrained by democracy or consumer power. The politics of scale permit them to bully governments, tear up standards, and reshape the world to suit them. We also recognised that this was a dialectical process. As businesses began to operate globally, so could the campaigns against them. By improving global communications and ensuring that we could all speak their language, they helped us to confront them more effectively.

But hardly anyone believed that change could happen so fast. Through the 80s and 90s, they brushed us off like dust. Then, as a result of powerful campaigns against sweatshops in the US and Europe, some of the big clothing and sports retailers broke ranks. Soon after that, the energy companies started announcing big investments in renewable technologies (though not, unfortunately, any corresponding disinvestments in fossil fuel). But the supermarkets have shifted faster than anyone else. Environmental campaigners are partly responsible (listen to how the superstore bosses keep name-checking the green pressure groups); even so, their sudden conversion leaves us reeling.

Embarrassingly, for those of us who have scorned the idea of corporate social responsibility, some of these companies now claim to be setting higher standards than any government would dare to impose on them. Marks and Spencer, for example, has promised to become carbon neutral, to cease sending waste to landfill by 2012, and to stop stocking any fish, wood or paper that has not been sustainably sourced. Tesco promises to attach a carbon label to all its goods. Wal-Mart now says it will run its US stores entirely on renewable energy.

These standards, moreover, are rather higher than those the British government sets for itself. M&S has pledged to use carbon offsets (paying other people to make cuts on its behalf) only as "a last resort". The government uses them as a first resort. Could it be true, as the neoliberals insist, that markets can do more to change the world than governments? If so, it reflects democratic failure as much as market success. Held back by forces both real and imagined, politicians have failed to confront the environmental crisis, just as they have failed to tackle inequality, or to challenge the power of the White House, the media barons, the corporations and the banks. The choice between two rival brands of margarine appears to have become more meaningful than the choice between Labour and the Conservatives.

It is also true to say that The Wal-Mart Effect is a real one. When a huge company changes course, the impact is felt all over the world. One positive decision by the leviathan rumbles more widely than a thousand decisions by its smaller competitors. But those of us who have fought for the environment and against big business have not yet become redundant. There is plenty to celebrate in the recent announcements and plenty to suspect.

Tesco, for example, has made some bold commitments, to which it might eventually be held. At the moment they are weeviled with contradictions and evasions. In his speech on Thursday, the company's chief executive, Sir Terry Leahy, spoke of the sophisticated new refrigeration techniques that Tesco will use, which will allow it to reduce its consumption of climate changing gases called hydrofluorocarbons. But at no point did he mention an environmental technology called the door. How can you claim your stores are sustainable if the fridges and freezers don't have doors?

Tesco's press officer was unable to tell me whether the energy savings the company has promised (50% per square metre by 2010) will be independently audited. If not, the promise is worthless - a company can make any claim it likes if there is no outside body to hold it to account.

Leahy announced that he would respond to one of the biggest complaints of the green groups by cutting the distance Tesco's products travel, especially by air. He would also switch some of the chain's road freight (he did not say how much) to rail. But he said nothing about reducing the journeys made by his customers. Shopping accounts for 20% of car journeys in the UK, and 12% of the distance covered. By closing their out-of-town stores and replacing them with warehouses and deliveries, the supermarket chains could reduce the energy costs of their buildings and (according to government figures) cut the transport emissions caused by shopping by 70%.

Today, the Competition Commission publishes the initial results of its inquiry into the market dominance of the superstores. One of the issues it is investigating is the "land bank" accumulated by Tesco - a huge portfolio of sites on which the company appears to be sitting until it can obtain planning permission. Many of them are out of town. If Tesco develops them, it will drag even more cars on to the road. Out-of-town shopping is incompatible with sustainability.

So, perhaps, is the sheer scale of the business. Wal-Mart and Tesco can change the world at the stroke of a pen, but one decision they will not make voluntarily is to relax their grip on local economies. It will always be harder for small businesses to work with a global behemoth than with the local baker or butcher; Tesco's economy will continue to favour the big, distant supplier over the man down the road. And what of the sense of community that independent small shops help to foster, which encourages people to make their friends close to home? If love miles are the most intractable cause of climate change, we need to start cultivating as much community spirit as we can.

But there is a bigger contradiction than this, which has been overlooked by the supermarkets and by many of their critics. "The green movement," Leahy tells us, "must become a mass movement in green consumption." But what about consuming less? Less is the one thing the superstores cannot sell us. As further efficiencies become harder to extract, their growth will eventually outstrip all their reductions in the use of energy. This is not Tesco's problem alone: the green movement's alternatives still lack force.

The big retailers are competing to convince us that they are greener than their rivals, and this should make us glad. But we still need governments, and we still need campaigners.

Oceania and East Asia

2007-01-17T13:14:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to Ian at transafixion for teaching me how to post YouTube clips.

On Getting Older

2007-01-16T22:10:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite things about aging is getting to see older movies again, as though they were new, because I can't remember what happened in them from the first time I saw them 10, 15, 20 years ago.

I watched Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah in Roxanne a few weeks ago, while painting bookshelves for my kids' room, and it was wonderful. Then the other night, I happened upon my husband watching Wayne's World. Schaaawing!

Beginning to lose my mind at the ripe old age of 33 is great.

Also funny is that I couldn't remember if I blogged about this before. If I did, I apologize to regular readers, and request that you weigh in on whether forgetting about memory loss is ironic or something else.

Antonio Machado

2007-01-16T21:24:00.000-05:00

Proverbios y cantares XXIX

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road--
Only wakes upon the sea.

Bill Moyers' Speech in Memphis

2007-01-16T21:16:00.000-05:00

"The degree to which this has become a purely ideological debate, devoid of any factual basis that people can weigh the gains and losses is reflected in Thomas Friedman's astonishing claim, stated not long ago in a television interview, that he endorsed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) without even reading it. That is simply because it stood for “free trade.” "

What Floats?

2007-01-16T21:07:00.000-05:00

Thomas Friedman has always bugged me, infinitely so since this morning, when I heard Bill Moyers speech to the Third Annual Media Reform Conference in Memphis Tennessee last weekend. Friedman apparently blithely admitted to an interviewer that he endorsed CAFTA without ever having read the bill, simply because it purported to further the cause of "free trade." -KW

Not Just Wrong, but All Wrong
by Paul Campos

Twenty years ago, in its pre-season baseball issue, Sports Illustrated predicted the Cleveland Indians would finish with the best record in the major leagues. Cleveland went on to finish with the worst record. Statistical guru Bill James pointed out that this represented an example of what might be called Maximum Possible Error.

When it comes to the Iraq war, some of our most prominent pundits have achieved similar results. Perhaps the most spectacular example is provided by William Kristol.

Since the start of the war, Kristol has claimed that "there's almost no evidence" Iraqi Shiites wouldn't be able to get along with Sunnis; that it was a mistake to worry that Iraq "would fracture into feuding clans and unleash a bloodbath"; that the January 2005 Iraqi elections represented "a genuine turning point," comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall; that the situation in Iraq wouldn't get worse in 2006, and thus opposition to the war would prove to be an electoral disaster for Democrats; and that the Iraqi response to the bombing of the Samarra mosque this past February was "evidence of Iraq's underlying stability in the face of attempts to undermine it."

This is just a sample of the many things Kristol has said about Iraq that turned out to be not merely wrong, but the exact opposite of the truth. They represent nothing less than the Maximum Possible Error on all these matters.

And what has been the result of this astonishing performance? Have Kristol's employers fired him for gross incompetence? Has he been exiled from the national media for having been completely wrong, over and over again, about the most important issue facing America today?

Far from it! Kristol has just been hired by Time, America's leading news weekly, to write a column. This is the journalistic equivalent of handing the former captain of the Exxon Valdez a case of whiskey and the command of a fully loaded supertanker.

The nation's elite media continue to be in denial about the fact that most of America's most prominent pundits were wrong about Iraq. (Admittedly not all of them were as wrong as Kristol. The average pundit couldn't manage to be as wrong as Kristol if he tried.)

One symptom of this denial is the bizarrely upward trajectory of Kristol's career path. Another is how the fact that a number of commentators who were every bit as right about Iraq as Kristol has been wrong (modesty forbids me from noting I was among them) has gone down the memory hole.

These people pointed out that it was quite unclear whether Saddam Hussein still had any weapons of mass destruction; that, in any case, Iraq presented no military threat to the United States; that invading the country could well trigger factional bloodshed which would last many years; that fighting terrorism by trying to install democracy at gunpoint in Iraq made no sense; and that the whole project was likely to end in disaster.

At best, these dissenters were dismissed as "unserious" semi-pacifist hippies, who didn't understand how "9/11 changed everything." Often, their patriotism was slandered by supposedly respectable commentators like law professor Glenn Reynolds, who in the tradition of Joe McCarthy made ominous claims about how critics of the war were actively pro-terrorist, or at the very least were "acting unpatriotically" and "hurting our troops abroad."

And so it goes. For example, the terribly serious New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who just six weeks ago declared that the only rational alternatives in Iraq were a 150,000-troop escalation or a phased withdrawal, has now announced he'll support President Bush's 21,000-troop escalation - but only if Bush proposes a massive tax hike and does some other things that are as likely to happen as Saddam Hussein and John Belushi showing up to co-host next week's episode of Saturday Night Live.

If chutzpah was a crime, these guys would be serving life sentences.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado.

Antonio Gramsci

2007-01-16T10:30:00.000-05:00

"Pessimism of the Intellect. Optimism of the Will."

Marge Piercy

2007-01-16T10:20:00.000-05:00

"The Low Road"

What can they do to you?
Whatever they want.
They can set you up,
they can bust you,
they can break your fingers,
they can burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you can't walk,
can't remember.

They can take your child,
wall up your lover.
They can do anything
you can't stop them from doing.
How can you stop them?

Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse,
you can take what revenge you can.
But they roll over you.

But two people
fighting back to back
can cut through a mob,
a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon,
an army can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other sane,
can give support, conviction, love,
massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge.

With four you can play bridge
and start an organization.
With six you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no seconds,
and hold a fund raising party.

A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time.
It starts when you care to act.
It starts when you do it again after they said "No."
It starts when you say "We"
and know you who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.

Bush's Speech Annotated

2007-01-12T13:09:00.001-05:00

My Dad's Thoughts

2007-01-11T22:08:00.000-05:00

Candlelight Vigil for Two

2007-01-11T21:39:00.000-05:00

Public Media, Citizen Power

2007-01-11T13:46:00.000-05:00

Global Marshall Plan

2007-01-11T13:32:00.000-05:00

From Rabbi Michael Lerner at the Network of Spiritual Progressives:

"...We've proposed the Global Marshall Plan—having the U.S. take 5% of the GDP of the U.S. each year for the next twenty years (and using its leading by example to pressure other G8 countries to eventually join this) to end once and for all global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, inadequate health care and to repair the physical environment of our planet earth..."

Hope

2007-01-11T13:22:00.000-05:00

"...almost everywhere I have been these last 12 months, people are still looking to America for its unique and longtime industry: hopefulness..."

Truly, It’s a Surprisingly Hopeful World

by Pico Iyer

The emails keep streaming in, here in my little apartment in Japan, from friends in California and places farther east. The world is unraveling daily, they say; we’re going through a period of darkness unprecedented in our history. The war against terrorism is a war without end, in effect; the strikes of 9/11 have put us all on edge, even on trial, for life.

I read the messages — kids walking in the sunshine to their schools outside my window — and wonder what planet I’ve landed on. The cries I hear in my friends’ voices are those of conscience, and there’s something stirring in their concern about America’s war-mongering and injustices.

And yet, I feel like saying, America — though still the strongest power in the world — is by no means the largest or even the central one. One in every three people on our planet lives in China or India, and for those worthy souls, the new century is a time of possibilities unimagined before. There is corruption and oppression and pollution all over China; India is still a byword for suffering and poverty; and yet, for more than 2 billion of our neighbors in the global village, history is moving in a positive direction.

In Japan, where I live, people are beginning to look up at last after a decade of recession. In Berlin, where I spent some of the summer, the wounds of the recent past seem so unthreatening that they have been turned into architectural wonders. In Bolivia, where I often find myself, people are exulting in the fact that for the first time in their history, they have a leader who looks and sounds quite a bit like themselves.

Growing up near London, I could never have dreamed that the dreary, colorless, greasy home of fish and chips would, in just a generation, become one of the hottest — youngest, freshest, most stylish and international — cities on the planet.

I know, of course, that in Kashmir, in the Middle East, and especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is war; the sadder truth is that there has been war in all of these places for a long, long time. I know that more than a billion of our neighbors are without enough food or water or shelter, and that it is our responsibility in a planetary community to think of them and care for them.

Traveling around Sri Lanka this summer, suicide bombers doing their work all around me, I found myself not only in an all-too-typical modern cycle of vengeance without end, I was also in a model, on the physically paradisal island, of so many places on the planet where two groups feel they cannot share the same space, and the intolerance of a few makes for the daily tragedy of the many.

Yet almost everywhere I have been these last 12 months, people are still looking to America for its unique and longtime industry: hopefulness. America on the screen and in their minds continues to mean, among all the difficult and belligerent things it now means, the capital of possibility. Immigrants write back to relatives around the world to say that their new home is not the land they dreamed of, but it is a place where a new life is possible and futures can be generated. The U.S. government and the nation’s cultural exports may never have been so unpopular; the American spirit of possibility may never have been so prevalent.

The world finds itself, therefore, in one of the strangest of situations. Even as more and more places are partaking of an optimism that might traditionally have been called all-American (having to do with the chance for a better life and new freedoms), America itself is busy indulging itself in the gloominess of the Old World. And even as a little light is appearing for peasants and the smart but jobless in the world’s largest countries, those whose lives they aspire to are speaking of the Dark Ages.

We live now in a global, not an American, century. And in such circumstances, it can be a little odd to focus entirely on our own small fears when the majority of our neighbors — in Bangalore and Shanghai and Berlin and even South Africa — are laying claim to opportunities they could not have enjoyed even a few years ago.

The war in Iraq, the loss of faith in our leaders and institutions, the ever more violent polarization between blue states and red — these are all real reasons to mourn. But they are no reason for ignoring or writing off more than half the people in the world, for whom the new year could be, in fact, very possibly a happy one.

Pico Iyer, born in London of Indian parents, is a travel writer whose books include The Global Soul.

On Reinventing the Wheel

2007-01-11T12:54:00.000-05:00

Lately, in my social justice work at my church, I've been thinking about the whole idea that one shouldn't "reinvent the wheel." True enough, the records I keep of what I do and how I do it might someday be useful to someone else in the same position as social justice committee chair.

But it seems that more important than what you do is what motivates you to do it. I'm discovering that if you are really interested in your work, because you choose your goals and your tasks and your methods yourself, to match your interests and skills, then you do just put one foot in front of the other and incorporate the feedback as it comes, until you get as far as you can go.

Much of it may be reinventing the wheel, and I'm constantly inundated with suggestions and advice and offers of seminars and classes, not only on "How to" put together different projects and events, but even which issues I should be organizing to addresss. The point is, I don't think you really learn about how to choose and work toward goals, or about yourself, unless you DO reinvent the wheel by starting from scratch, with a minimum of reference to other people's work and other people's tactics and strategies. If it comes from someone else's heart, your heart isn't going to be in it.

Which begs the question: how to get others involved in group projects if you advocate for "everybody do your own thing." I think about this constantly, convinced, as I am, that we will have to work together much better than we do if we're to right this capsizing ship of human civilization.

But for now, I can just say I think part of the answer is trust-building, getting people to understand that you will do what you say you will do, so they don't feel their time and effort helping is wasted. There is so much political resignation and despair to cut through...

Michael Moore's Got Some Good Ideas

2007-01-11T12:45:00.000-05:00

Dear Mr. President: Send Even MORE Troops (and you go, too!) ...from Michael Moore

1/10/07

Dear Mr. President,

Thanks for your address to the nation. It's good to know you still want to talk to us after how we behaved in November.

Listen, can I be frank? Sending in 20,000 more troops just ain't gonna do the job. That will only bring the troop level back up to what it was last year. And we were losing the war last year! We've already had over a million troops serve some time in Iraq since 2003. Another few thousand is simply not enough to find those weapons of mass destruction! Er, I mean... bringing those responsible for 9/11 to justice! Um, scratch that. Try this -- BRING DEMOCRACY TO THE MIDDLE EAST! YES!!!

You've got to show some courage, dude! You've got to win this one! C'mon, you got Saddam! You hung 'im high! I loved watching the video of that -- just like the old wild west! The bad guy wore black! The hangmen were as crazy as the hangee! Lynch mobs rule!!!

Look, I have to admit I feel very sorry for the predicament you're in. As Ricky Bobby said, "If you're not first, you're last." And you being humiliated in front of the whole world does NONE of us Americans any good.

Sir, listen to me. You have to send in MILLIONS of troops to Iraq, not thousands! The only way to lick this thing now is to flood Iraq with millions of us! I know that you're out of combat-ready soldiers -- so you have to look elsewhere! The only way you are going to beat a nation of 27 million -- Iraq -- is to send in at least 28 million! Here's how it would work:

The first 27 million Americans go in and kill one Iraqi each. That will quickly take care of any insurgency. The other one million of us will stay and rebuild the country. Simple.

Now, I know you're saying, where will I find 28 million Americans to go to Iraq? Here are some suggestions:

1. More than 62,000,000 Americans voted for you in the last election (the one that took place a year and half into a war we already knew we were losing). I am confident that at least a third of them would want to put their body where there vote was and sign up to volunteer. I know many of these people and, while we may disagree politically, I know that they don't believe someone else should have to go and fight their fight for them -- while they hide here in America.

2. Start a "Kill an Iraqi" Meet-Up group in cities across the country. I know this idea is so early-21st century, but I once went to a Lou Dobbs Meet-Up and, I swear, some of the best ideas happen after the third mojito. I'm sure you'll get another five million or so enlistees from this effort.

3. Send over all members of the mainstream media. After all, they were your collaborators in bringing us this war -- and many of them are already trained from having been "embedded!" If that doesn't bring the total to 28 million, then draft all viewers of the FOX News channel.

Mr. Bush, do not give up! Now is not the time to pull your punch! Don't be a weenie by sending in a few over-tired troops. Get your people behind you and YOU lead them in like a true commander in chief! Leave no conservative behind! Full speed ahead!

We promise to write. Go get 'em W!

Yours,

Michael Moore

One Campaign Working to Save Funding for Anti-Poverty Work

2007-01-09T23:20:00.000-05:00

One Campaign needs our help to save $1 billion in anti-poverty funding.

Click here.

Gandhian Jon Stewart

2007-01-08T22:17:00.000-05:00

The Occupation Project

2007-01-08T22:15:00.000-05:00

Rep. Mike Ferguson's New Jersey District Office:
45 Mountain Blvd. Building D, Suite 1
Warren, NJ 07059

The Kucinich Plan for Iraq

2007-01-08T20:03:00.000-05:00

From Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and Presidential candidate for 2008:

In November of 2006, after an October upsurge in violence in Iraq, the American people moved decisively to reject Republican rule, principally because of the conduct of the war. Democratic leaders well understand we regained control of the Congress because of the situation in Iraq.

However, two months later, the Congress is still searching for a plan around which it can unite to hasten the end of US involvement in Iraq and the return home of 140,000 US troops.

There is a compelling need for a new direction in Iraq, one that recognizes the plight of the people of Iraq, the false and illegal basis of the United States war against Iraq, the realities on the ground which make a military resolution of the conflict unrealistic and the urgent responsibility of the United States, which caused the chaos, to use the process of diplomacy and international law to achieve stability in Iraq, a process which will establish peace and stability in Iraq and allow our troops to return home with dignity.

The Administration is preparing to escalate the conflict. They intend to increase troop numbers to unprecedented levels, without establishing an ending date for the so-called troop surge. By definition, this escalation means a continuation of the occupation, more troop and civilian casualties, more anger toward the US, more support for the insurgency, more instability in Iraq and in the region, and prolonged civil war at a time when there is a general agreement in the world community that the solution in Iraq must be political not military. Iraq is now a training ground for insurgents who practice against our troops.

What is needed is a comprehensive political process. And the decision is not President Bush's alone to make.

Congress, as a coequal branch of government has a responsibility to assist in the initiation of this process. Congress, under Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution has the war-making power. Congress appropriates funds for the war. Congress does not dispense with its obligation to the American people simply by opposing a troop surge in Iraq.

There are 140,000 troops remaining in Iraq right now. What about them? When will they come home? Why would we leave those troops in Iraq when we have the money to bring them home? Soon the President will ask for more money for the war. Why would Congress appropriate more money to keep the troops in Iraq through the end of President Bush's term, at a total cost of upwards of two trillion dollars and thousands of more troop casualties, when military experts say there is no military solution? Our soldiers stand for us in the field. We must stand for them in our legislature by bringing them home.

It is simply not credible to maintain that one opposes the war and yet continues to fund it. This contradiction runs as a deep fault line through our politics, undermining public trust in the political process and in those elected to represent the people. If you oppose the war, then do not vote to fund it.

If you have money which can be used to bring the troops home or to prosecute the war, do not say you want to bring the troops home while you appropriate money in a supplemental to keep them in Iraq fighting a war that cannot be won militarily. This is why the Administration should be notified now that Congress will not approve of the appropriations request of up to $160 billion in the spring for the purposes of continuing the occupation and the war. Continuing to fund the war is not a plan. It would represent the continuation of disaster.

The US sent our troops into Iraq without a clear mission. We created a financial, military and moral dilemma for our nation and now we are talking about the Iraq war as our problem. The Iraqis are forgotten. Their country has been destroyed: 650,000 casualties, [based on the Lancet Report which surveyed casualties from March of 2003 to July of 2006] the shredding of the social fabric of the nation, civil war, lack of access to food, shelter, electricity, clean drinking water and health care because this Administration, with the active participation of the Congress, authorized a war without reason, without conscience, without international law.

The US thinks in terms of solving our own military, strategic, logistical, and political problems. The US can determine how to solve our problems, but the Iraqi people will have problems far into the future. This requires an intensive focus on the processes needed to stabilize Iraq. If you solve the Iraqi problem you solve the US problem. Any comprehensive plan for Iraq must take into account as a primary matter the conditions and the needs of the Iraqi people, while providing our nation with a means of righting grievous wrongs and taking steps to regain US credibility and felicity within the world community.

I am offering such a plan today. This plan responds to the concerns of a majority of Americans. On Tuesday, when Congress resumes its work, I will present this plan to leadership and members as the only viable alternative to the Bush Administration's policy of continued occupation and escalation. Congress must know that it cannot and must not stand by and watch our troops and innocent Iraqi civilians die.

These are the elements of the Kucinich Plan:

1. The US announces it will end the occupation, close military bases and withdraw. The insurgency has been fueled by the occupation and the prospect of a long-term presence as indicated by the building of permanent bases. A US declaration of an intention to withdraw troops and close bases will help dampen the insurgency which has been inspired to resist colonization and fight invaders and those who have supported US policy. Furthermore this will provide an opening where parties within Iraq and in the region can set the stage for negotiations towards peaceful settlement.

2. US announces that it will use existing funds to bring the troops and necessary equipment home. Congress appropriated $70 billion in bridge funds on October 1st for the war. Money from this and other DOD accounts can be used to fund the troops in the field over the next few months, and to pay for the cost of the return of the troops, (which has been estimated at between $5 and $7 billion dollars) while a political settlement is being negotiated and preparations are made for a transition to an international security and peacekeeping force.

3. Order a simultaneous return of all US contractors to the United States and turn over all contracting work to the Iraqi government. The contracting process has been rife with world-class corruption, with contractors stealing from the US Government and cheating the Iraqi people, taking large contracts and giving 5% or so to Iraqi subcontractors.

Reconstruction activities must be reorganized and closely monitored in Iraq by the Iraqi government, with the assistance of the international community. The massive corruption as it relates to US contractors, should be investigated by congressional committees and federal grand juries. The lack of tangible benefits, the lack of accountability for billions of dollars, while millions of Iraqis do not have a means of financial support, nor substantive employment, cries out for justice.

It is noteworthy that after the first Gulf War, Iraqis re-established electricity within three months, despite sanctions. Four years into the US occupation there is no water, nor reliable electricity in Baghdad, despite massive funding from the US and from the Madrid conference. The greatest mystery involves the activities of private security companies who function as mercenaries. Reports of false flag operations must be investigated by an international tribunal.

4. Convene a regional conference for the purpose of developing a security and stabilization force for Iraq. The focus should be on a process which solves the problems of Iraq. The US has told the international community, "This is our policy and we want you to come and help us implement it." The international community may have an interest in helping Iraq, but has no interest in participating in the implementation of failed US policy.

A shift in US policy away from unilateralism and toward cooperation will provide new opportunities for exploring common concerns about the plight of Iraq. The UN is the appropriate place to convene, through the office of the Secretary General, all countries that have interests, concerns and influence, including the five permanent members of the Security Council and the European community, and all Arab nations.

The end of the US occupation and the closing of military bases are necessary preconditions for such a conference. When the US creates a shift of policy and announces it will focus on the concerns of the people of Iraq, it will provide a powerful incentive for nations to participate.

It is well known that while some nations may see the instability in Iraq as an opportunity, there is also an even-present danger that the civil war in Iraq threatens the stability of nations throughout the region. The impending end of the occupation will provide a breakthrough for the cooperation between the US and the UN and the UN and countries of the region. The regional conference must include Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

5. Prepare an international security and peacekeeping force to move in, replacing US troops who then return home. The UN has an indispensable role to play here, but cannot do it as long as the US is committed to an occupation. The UN is the only international organization with the ability to mobilize and the legitimacy to authorize troops.

The UN is the place to develop the process, to build the political consensus, to craft a political agreement, to prepare the ground for the peacekeeping mission, to implement the basis of an agreement that will end the occupation and begin the transition to international peacekeepers. This process will take at least three months from the time the US announces the intention to end the occupation.

The US will necessarily have to fund a peacekeeping mission, which, by definition will not require as many troops. Fifty percent of the peacekeeping troops must come from nations with large Muslim populations. The international security force, under UN direction, will remain in place until the Iraqi government is capable of handling its own security. The UN can field an international security and peacekeeping mission, but such an initiative will not take shape unless there is a peace to keep, and that will be dependent upon a political process which reaches agreement between all the Iraqi parties. Such an agreement means fewer troops will be needed.

According to UN sources, the UN the peacekeeping mission in the Congo, which is four times larger in area than Iraq, required about twenty thousand troops. Finally the UN does not mobilize quickly because they depend upon governments to supply the troops, and governments are slow. The ambition of the UN is to deploy in less than ninety days. However, without an agreement of parties the UN is not likely to approve a mission to Iraq, because countries will not give them troops.

6. Develop and fund a process of national reconciliation. The process of reconciliation must begin with a national conference, organized with the assistance of the UN and with the participation of parties who can create, participate in and affect the process of reconciliation, defined as an airing of all grievances and the creation of pathways toward open, transparent talks producing truth and resolution of grievances. The Iraqi government has indicated a desire for the process of reconciliation to take place around it, and that those who were opposed to the government should give up and join the government. Reconciliation must not be confused with capitulation, nor with realignments for the purposes of protecting power relationships.

For example, Kurds need to be assured that their own autonomy will be regarded and therefore obviate the need for the Kurds to align with religious Shia for the purposes of self-protection. The problem in Iraq is that every community is living in fear. The Shia, who are the majority, fear they will not be allowed to government even though they are a majority. The Kurds are afraid they will lose the autonomy they have gained. The Sunnis think they will continue to be made to pay for the sins of Saddam.

A reconciliation process which brings people together is the only way to overcome their fears and reconcile their differences. It is essential to create a minimum of understanding and mutual confidence between the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.

But how can a reconciliation process be constructed in Iraq when there is such mistrust? Ethnic cleansing is rampant. The police get their money from the US and their ideas from Tehran. They function as religious militia, fighting for supremacy, while the Interior Ministry collaborates. Two or three million people have been displaced. When someone loses a family member, a loved one, a friend, the first response is likely to be that there is no reconciliation.

It is also difficult to move toward reconciliation when one or several parties engaged in the conflict think they can win outright. The Shia, some of whom are out for revenge, think they can win because they have the defacto support of the US. The end of the US occupation will enhance the opportunity for the Shia to come to an accommodation with the Sunnis. They have the oil, the weapons, and support from Iran. They have little interest in reconciling with those who are seen as Baathists.

The Sunnis think they have experience, as the former army of Saddam, boasting half a million insurgents. The Sunnis have so much more experience and motivation that as soon as the Americans leave they believe they can defeat the Shia government. Any Sunni revenge impulses can be held in check by international peacekeepers. The only sure path toward reconciliation is through the political process. All factions and all insurgents not with al Queda must be brought together in a relentless process which involves Saudis, Turks and Iranians.

7. Reconstruction and Jobs. Restart the failed reconstruction program in Iraq. Rebuild roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and other public facilities, houses, and factories with jobs and job training going to local Iraqis.

8. Reparations. The US and Great Britain have a high moral obligation to enable a peace process by beginning a program of significant reparations to the people of Iraq for the loss of lives, physical and emotional injuries, and damage to property. There should be special programs to rescue the tens of thousands of Iraqi orphans from lives of destitution. This is essential to enable reconciliation.

9. Political Sovereignty. Put an end to suspicions that the US invasion and occupation was influenced by a desire to gain control of Iraq's oil assets by A) setting aside initiatives to privatize Iraqi oil interests or other national assets, and B) by abandoning efforts to change Iraqi national law to facilitate privatization.

Any attempt to sell Iraqi oil assets during the US occupation will be a significant stumbling block to peaceful resolution. The current Iraqi constitution gives oil proceeds to the regions and the central government gets nothing. There must be fairness in the distribution of oil resources in Iraq. An Iraqi National Oil Trust should be established to guarantee the oil assets will be used to create a fully functioning infrastructure with financial mechanisms established protect the oil wealth for the use of the people of Iraq.

10. Iraq Economy. Set forth a plan to stabilize Iraq's cost for food and energy, on par to what the prices were before the US invasion and occupation. This would block efforts underway to raise the price of food and energy at a time when most Iraqis do not have the means to meet their own needs.

11. Economic Sovereignty. Work with the world community to restore Iraq's fiscal integrity without structural readjustment measures of the IMF or the World Bank.

12. International Truth and Reconciliation. Establish a policy of truth and reconciliation between the people of the United States and the people of Iraq. In 2002, I led the effort in the House of Representatives challenging the Bush Administration's plans to go to war in Iraq. I organized 125 Democrats to vote against the Iraq war resolution. The analysis I offered at that time stands out in bold relief for its foresight when compared to the assessments of many who today aspire to national leadership.

Just as the caution I urged four years ago was well-placed, so the plan I am presenting today is workable, and it responds to the will of the American people, expressed this past November. This is a moment for clarity and foresight. This is a moment to take a new direction in Iraq. One with honor and dignity. One which protects our troops and rescues Iraqi civilians. One which repairs our relationship with Iraqis and with the world.

Thank you,

Dennis J Kucinich

America Says No

2007-01-07T15:24:00.000-05:00

No more troops. Escalation is no way to end the occupation.

Mothering Styles

2007-01-06T11:29:00.000-05:00

From motherstyles.com (this is the type I happen to be):

INTP - The “Love of Learning” Mother (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving)

“I keep the encyclopedia in the kitchen so we can look up things together while we eat.”

Intellectually curious and patient, the INTP mother relishes those times with a child when they are learning something interesting together. Whether they’re at the zoo or computer terminal, she sparks to answering his or her “whys” with in-depth responses or new knowledge.

The INTP mother is also objective and introspective. She listens to and discusses children’s ideas and questions as she would those of a peer, fostering self-esteem and confidence. Open and non-directive, she allows children the freedom to do for themselves and quietly encourages them to believe they can do it.

Independence, autonomy, intellectual development, and self-reliance are probably the INTP’s highest priorities for her children. An avid reader, she naturally imparts an appreciation and love of reading as well.

Drawn to all types of learning, the INTP may also value her mothering experience for all the new insights about life it provides her.

Knock Knock

2007-01-06T11:15:00.000-05:00

Knock Knock.

Who's there?

Little girl.

Little girl who?

Little girl who can't reach the doorbell.

Taking Chances

2007-01-04T22:02:00.000-05:00

With the Democrats in power after American citizens voted for meaningful change, there’s at least a slim chance that Bush and Cheney will finally be held accountable for their crimes against the people and the Constitutional rule of law in the U.S.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is clearly stating she has no intention of pushing for impeachment, and also no intention of acceding to the American and Iraqi peoples’ strong demand for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from the bloody mess in Iraq. Pelosi is sharply curtailing the plans of new Congressional committee chairs like John Conyers, Henry Waxman and Charles Rangel to launch investigations and public hearings that would likely lead to impeachment.

Pelosi’s reasoning is apparently pragmatic – impeachment would occur, at the earliest, a year from now, when Bush and Cheney had only a year left in office anyway. Pursuing impeachment in the run-up to 2008 might be spun, by opponents, as “political” retribution, or a sign that Pelosi is simply gunning for the President’s job, since she would be next in line after Cheney.

Those concerns are irrelevant, because they’re short-sighted, looking only two years down the road. Bush and Cheney must be impeached, because if they are not removed from office for their documented, admitted crimes – lying about the reasons for the preemptive invasion of Iraq, ordering and condoning torture, extraordinary renditions, warrantless wiretapping, and a host of other violations of U.S. and international law – then the American public, through Congress, is sending a clear message to every President who will take office in the future:

“We just don’t care about the rule of law. We’re fine living with neither checks nor balances, with no inherent and inalienable rights, with each of us subject to the unquestioned dictates of whoever occupies the White House at any given time.”

Maybe it’s true. I think our public cynicism is deep and well-founded, 30 years out from Watergate, with more historical evidence every year of how often, how blatantly and how cruelly our governments have lied to us and broken laws throughout this great 230-year experiment in democracy.

But I’ve also spent a lot of time over the past few years watching local citizens’ movements grow all over the world. The problems facing human beings – global warming, fossil fuel depletion, nuclear weapons, infectious disease pandemics, widening gaps between rich and poor – are huge and frightening. Some people have responded by burying their heads in delusional thinking, and I can’t blame them for hiding from the reality of what confronts us all.

More people have responded by quietly considering whether the human species is worth trying to save. Most have decided that, warts and all, we are, and have moved on to ponder the odds of success. However low or high you estimated those odds, any chance is better than not trying.

So the vast majority of the world’s people are carefully making transformational plans for life without oil and gas, without extreme poverty and war, life with larger natural disasters and fewer long car and truck trips. We’re working to build smaller communities of people who really know each other and are really prepared to trust and help each other out. We’re working to build strong local oversight of local governments, to support and inform elected representatives as they decide how and when to spend public wealth. We’re working to create clean energy for home heating and gardens producing local food on every city block. It will take all this, and more. But it’s definitely worth the effort. Please join in, in whatever way you most enjoy, wherever you happen to be.

MomsRising on Conservative Talk Show

2007-01-04T14:25:00.000-05:00

MomsRising will be on a conservative call-in show today at 4 p.m. E.S.T.
Call 1-800-955-1776 if you want to participate in the discussion.

Some talking points they forwarded:

-DISCRIMINATION AGAINST MOTHERS/MATERNAL PROFILING FACTS:

1. Mothers earn less: Non-mothers earn 90 cents to a man's dollar; mothers earn 73 cents; and single mothers earn about 60 cents to a man's dollar. This explains why so many women and children in the U.S. live in poverty, and why there are so few women in leadership.

2. Discrimination against hiring mothers is rampant. Recent Cornell University research by Dr. Shelley Correll confirmed what many American women learn when they look for work: Mothers are 44 percent less likely to be hired than non-mothers who have the same résumé, experience, and qualifications; and mothers are offered significantly lower starting pay (study participants offered non-mothers an average of $11,000 more than mothers) for the same job as equally qualified non-mothers.

3. Ann Crittenden writes, "....a college-educated woman with one child can easily pay a 'Mommy tax' (lost lifetime earnings) of $1 million." This explains why so many more elderly women than men live in poverty.

Supporting facts:

- 82 percent of all American women become mothers by the time they are forty-four years old.

- Among all of the moms in America, almost three-quarters have jobs outside of their homes. American women now make up 46 percent of the entire paid labor force.

- Statistics from 2001 reveal that in the United States of America--land of opportunity--a full one-quarter of families with children under age six earned less than $25,000 that year. An income level that is so low most families of four would qualify for food stamps.

KEY MESSAGE: National policies and programs with proven success in other countries--like paid family leave, flexible work options, subsidized childcare and preschool, as well as healthcare coverage for all kids--are largely lacking in America. These programs support parents, in particular primary caregivers, hence there is substantially less bias against mothers in countries with good support for families.

M = MATERNITY/PATERNITY (PAID FAMILY LEAVE) FACTS:

1. The United States is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn't have some form of paid leave for new moms. And of 168 countries studied world-wide, the U.S. is one of only 4 that doesn't have some form of paid family leave for new moms. That puts the US--one of the wealthiest nations on the planet--in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland. Too many mothers in the U.S. must choose between caring for their new infants and working to feed their families.

2. A weighty consequence emerges from this lack of family support. Research reveals that a full 25 percent of "poverty spells," or times when a family's income slips below what is needed for basic living expenses, begin with the birth of a baby.

3. There is a strong correlation between paid parental leave and thriving children--one study found that a year of job-protected paid leave is tied to 25 percent fewer post-neonatal deaths and those benefits continued forward in the child's life. Our lack of paid leave shows in our infant mortality rates. In terms of infant mortality rates, the U.S. tied for thirty-eighth in the world with Estonia, Poland, Slovakia, and the United Arab Emirates in 2003.

Supporting fact:

- 61 percent of American families with children have both parents in the labor force.

O = OPEN, FLEXIBLE WORK FACTS:

1. Workplace flex-time policies will go a long way towards helping women maintain viable careers and remain economically stable while having families. Businesses also benefit with higher employee retention, higher employee productivity, lower training and recruiting costs, and better employee performance.

2. Low wage workers are the least likely to have work flexibility; and most are, as Joan Williams reports, "One sick child away from being fired."

Supporting facts:

-A survey of working women reported in the Harvard Business Review found the majority of women surveyed (64 percent) reported flexible work arrangements as "either extremely or very important to them." The survey also found that, "by a considerable margin, highly qualified women find flexibility more important than compensation..."

- Highly qualified and generally fairly well paid women are the most likely to find or demand flexible schedules.

- Almost three-fourths of working adults state they don't control their work schedules. In fact, the top reason noted by highly educated and trained women for leaving the "fast track" is the lack of family time. The lack of flexible work options often leads women to quit needed jobs.

- When women take time out of the workforce they face huge wage hits, or pay cuts, when they later return (as 74 percent do within two years). These wage hits take a life-long toll: On average, women take an 18 percent cut in their pay, a significant wage hit, for an average of 2.2 years out of the labor force--with women in business sectors taking an increased hit of 28 percent. For those women who stay out of the labor force for three or more years, the news is even bleaker: A 37 percent loss of earning power.

T = TV & OTHER AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAMS FACTS:

1. More than 40,000 kindergarteners are home alone after school, with a total of more than 14,000,000 kindergarteners through twelfth grade kids on their own after school without supervision.

2. By the time the average child gets to elementary school they will have viewed 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence on television.

3. The peak time for juvenile crime is right after school gets out, which makes a compelling case for after-school programs.

Supporting facts:

- Providing after school care to at-risk youth not only benefits kids, but also the community coffers. A study of the effects of the After School Education and Safety Program Act of 2002 found that every dollar spent on an at-risk youth in an after school program brings a return of $8.92 to $12.90, mainly due to the amount saved by channeling the at-risk youth away from a life of crime (remember the juvenile crime rate is highest in the hours after school). Providing after school programs to non-risk youth also brings a return (between $2.99 and $4.05 for every dollar spent) due to, in part, improved school performance and graduation rates.

H = HEALTHCARE FOR ALL KIDS FACTS:

1. The truth is that according to the World Health Organization, the United States spends more on healthcare per person than any other nation in the world, yet still was only tied for the twenty-eighth highest life expectancy, and ranked in at a low thirty-seventh for our mortality rate of children under five years old. We aren't getting much for the money we spend.

2. Medical issues are a leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. In fact, half of all bankruptcy filings in 2001 were related to medical issues. There's been a twenty-threefold (2,300 percent) increase in medical related bankruptcy filings between 1981, when only 8 percent of bankruptcies were medical related, and 2001.

3. Most of those who went bankrupt had health insurance (a full 76 percent had insurance when their illness started), and those filing for bankruptcy are "predominantly in the middle or working classes." In fact, working families make up 81 percent of uninsured people.

Supporting facts:

- There were nine million uninsured children and forty-six million uninsured Americans in 2004.

- "The United States remains the only Western nation without universal health insurance coverage," writes Rick Mayes in his book, Universal Coverage: The Elusive Quest for National Health Insurance. Two-thirds of the 191 countries tracked by the World Health Organization pay a higher percentage of their citizen's total healthcare costs than the U.S. does.

E = EXCELLENT CHILDCARE FACTS:

1. A Children's Defense Fund study found child care in the United States costs between $4,000 and $10,000 a year for each child, with the costs rising for babies and younger children, special-needs kids, and kids living in parts of the country where the cost of living is higher.

2. The Children's Defense Fund reports that a study (Cost, Quality, and Child Outcomes in Child Care Centers) examining childcare in four states found, "child care at most centers in the United States is poor to mediocre," with 12 percent of centers providing less than minimal quality care-—defined as care that could harm "children's health, safety, and development." As for the centers that rated well for good quality care, those comprised only 14 percent.

3. The average childcare provider earns a salary of just $18,060 a year, and many don't have healthcare coverage.

Supporting facts:

- To put the cost of childcare in perspective, consider that a full one-quarter of families with children under age six earned less than $25,000 in 2001.

- Quality childcare saves money: One study (Significant Benefits by Lawrence Schweinhart and others) that researched the long-term impacts of good quality childcare for low-income children came to a similar conclusion, the Children's Defense Fund reports. That study found, "After 27 years, each $1 invested saved over $7 by increasing the likelihood that children would be literate, employed, and enrolled in postsecondary education, and making them less likely to be school dropouts, dependent on welfare, or arrested for criminal activity or delinquency."

- A Wisconsin study that looked at the impacts of extending their Kindergarten through twelfth grade education system to include free preschool for four year olds found that such programs save money in the long run. The study found early education reduces later crime rates and welfare needs, while increasing the total educational cost-benefit by 68 percent—partly through lowering the need for special education (saving $42 million) and students needing to repeat grades less often.

- The military has a good model and the Department of Defense has over 200,000 children in their care. The military prioritizes excellent child care, not just with their policies, but with funding: For example, in 2004 the Department of Defense budgeted $379 million to support serving over 200,000 children, not including additional supplemental funds. Consider that in the Army a family that makes below $28,000 annually pays no more than $43 per week for child care, or around $2,000 annually. And then compare that to the national average cost of childcare, which can rise to $10,000 per year or more. Moreover, military childcare workers are paid a living wage or better. Childcare subsidies make a real difference, particularly as the number of children and families who live in poverty grows. According to the U.S. Census, 35.9 million Americans lived in poverty in 2003, up from 31.6 million just three years before.

R= REALISTIC LIVING WAGE & EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK FACTS:

1. The minimum wage must be raised: By working a 52-week full-time job without unpaid breaks, the federal minimum wage comes to $10,712 per year.

2. Amy Caiazza, from The Institute for Women's Policy Research, notes, "We did a study that found if there wasn't a wage gap, the poverty rates for single moms would be cut in half, and the poverty rates for dual earner families would be cut by about 25 percent."

3. A close look at the numbers shows that the reason the wage gap is so large for all women is that the vast majority of women become mothers (82 percent). This majority of American women—mothers—are actually making less than the current average reported by the U.S. Census of 76 cents to a man's dollar, since the wages of non-mothers bring up the overall average.

Supporting facts:

-Countries with family-friendly policies in programs in place don't have as large of wage hits as we do.
- Men don't take wage hits after having children, women do.

On Slowing Down

2006-12-30T18:51:00.001-05:00

Introduction to Community Gardening

2006-12-30T13:28:00.001-05:00

View from 2025

2006-12-29T17:48:00.000-05:00

(I think that the tilters-at-windmills are also more important than the dinosaurs of nation-state governance, and better at preparing for the future too. Anyway, I love imaginary retrospectives from the future. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." I wrote something similar to Solnit's piece back in July. -KW)

Here are excerpts from her essay at The Nation. For the full essay, follow the title link.

"In some strange way, it turned out that windmill-builders were more important than the US Senate. They were certainly better at preparing for the future, anyway...

If the twentieth century was the age of dinosaurs--of General Motors and the Soviet Union, of McDonald's, globalized entertainment networks and information superhighways--the twenty-first has increasingly turned out to be the age of the small.

You can see it in the countless local-economy projects--wind-power stations, farmers' markets, local enviro organizations, food co-ops--that were already proliferating, hardly noticed, by the time the Saudi Oil Wars swept the whole Middle East, damaging major oilfields and bringing on the Great Gasoline Crisis of 2009. That was the one that didn't just send prices skyrocketing but actually becalmed the globe-roaming container ships with their great steel-box-loads of bottled water, sweatshop garments and other gratuitous commodities.

The resulting food crisis of the early years of the second decade of the century, which laid big-petroleum-style farming low, suddenly elevated the status of peasant immigrants from what was then called "the undeveloped world," particularly Mexico and Southeast Asia. They taught the less agriculturally skilled, in suddenly greening North American cities, to cultivate the victory gardens that mitigated the widespread famines then beginning to sweep the planet...

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

2006-12-29T15:11:00.000-05:00

I haven't read this book yet. What follows is a review from here. But I saw the author interviewed by Stephen Colbert recently, and find the ideas fit very closely with my own sense of hope for the future. -KW

Best book on 2012 I've read -- hands down

With a positive review from Sting on back, Daniel Pinchbeck pulls off an unlikely synthesis of views and visionaries relating to the approaching enigma of 2012. Setting the likes of William Irwin Thompson alongside Terence McKenna and Ken Wilber; Jose Arguelles and Carl Johan Calleman alongside John Major Jenkins; Rudolph Steiner and Julius Evola alongside Jean Gebser – and discussing everything from crop circles to alien abductions to contemporary psychedelics, Pinchbeck reveals a range that is at once playful, daring and instructive.

This book is a must for anyone wondering how to bring up this ungainly topic in public without being labeled another New Age casualty. Pinchbeck is at once erudite, passionate, and marvelously calm in his examination of what it means to live in the shadow of the possibility of time as we know it giving way to its cosmic renewal. Perhaps most exciting to me is Pinchbeck's call to a collective rush of moral responsibility as we approach this potential threshold of our collective cosmic transformation, in order to help usher it in with a shared and growing conscious intentionality that can meet the future head on.

In this regard, check out The Evolver Project and this snappy caption for its magazine, “Evolver”:

It’s no longer about knowing what’s wrong. It’s about becoming what’s right. It’s about integrating logic and heart, vision and will. It’s about making life juicier by making good ideas real. A new world is springing up around us – of visionary politics and liberating hackers, earthly communities and galactic highs. Evolver magazine & media and the EVO membership are portals into this world.

Evolver media will spread the “new news” of what’s possible, focusing on active solutions, helpful products, new social movements, and do-it-yourself designs. At once open-source group-mind and creative meta-media, the Evolver Project is designed to creatively and quickly respond to our rapidly changing times. Through our partnerships, cultural mixology, and creatively engaged membership, the Evolver Project will also serve as a model for a passionate planetary culture: one jacked up on collaboration, connection, and exuberant renewal.

Did you check out that last sentence??? Hell Yeah!

With this uniquely energizing strain of self-organizing funk-flavored visionary cosmic stewardship hitting the ground running, I'm starting to feel less like an isolated freak in my own musings of the near future and more like an early guest to perhaps the greatest party of all time.

Of course, it's not a perfect read – as Pinchbeck doesn't flinch from taking on way more than any author could chew in one book. In particular, his examination of our contemporary impoverished gender roles and superficial sexual trends is as daring as it is incomplete. Similarly, his analysis of what Kali actually signifies in this fabled time of Kali Yuga similarly seems less than fully thought through. Nevertheless, he goes there – and takes a hard, clear look based on his personal experience and his gut sense of truth – at both himself and the collective, in light of the even larger epic subject his book bravely confronts.

Christmas Greetings

2006-12-24T15:02:00.000-05:00

The children at our church did the annual Christmas pageant today. Part of it was a young man - of nearly draft age - reading the Christmas in the Trenches story.

Coming Up

2006-12-13T11:57:00.000-05:00

Coming Up, by Ani DiFranco

our father who art in a penthouse
sits in his 37th floor suite
and swivels to gaze down
at the city he made me in
he allows me to stand and
solicit graffiti until
he needs the land i stand on

in my darkened threshold
am pawing through my pockets
the receipts, the bus schedules
the matchbook phone numbers
the urgent napkin poems
all of which laundering has rendered
pulpy and strange
loose change and a key

ask me
go ahead, ask me if i care
i got the answer here
i wrote it down somewhere
i just gotta find it
i just gotta find it

somebody and their spray paint got too close
somebody came on too heavy
now look at me made ugly
by the drooling letters
i was better off alone
ain't that the way it is
they don't know the first thing
but you don't know that
until they take the first swing

my fingers are red and swollen from the cold
i'm getting bold in my old age
so go ahead, try the door
it doesn't matter anymore
i know the weak hearted are strong willed
and we are being kept alive
until we're killed

he's up there the ice
is clinking in his glass
he sends me little pieces of paper
i don't ask
i just empty my pockets and wait
it's not fate
it's just circumstance
i don't fool myself with romance

i just live
phone number to phone number
dusting them against my thighs
in the warmth of my pockets
which whisper history incessantly
asking me
where were you

i lower my eyes
wishing i could cry more
and care less,
yes it's true,
i was trying to love someone again,
i was caught caring,
bearing weight
but i love this city, this state

this country is too large
and whoever's in charge up there
had better take the elevator down
and put more than change in our cup
or else we
are coming
up

I love Ani DiFranco

2006-12-13T11:49:00.000-05:00

And Ani loves Dennis Kucinich.

Here are some other Ani lyrics:

they were digging a new foudation in Manhattan
and they discovered a slave cemetery there
may their souls rest easy
now that lynching is frowned upon
and we've moved on to the electric chair

and i wonder who's gonna be president,
tweedle dum or tweedle dummer?
and who's gonna have the big blockbuster box office this summer?
howabout we put up a wall between houses and the highway
and you can go your way , and i can go my way

except all the radios agree with all the tvs
and all the magazines agree with all the radios
and i keep hearing that same damn song everywhere i go
maybe i should put a bucket over my head
and a marshmallow in each ear
and stumble around for another dumb- dumb
waiting for another hit song to appear

people used to make recordsas in a record of an event
the event of people playing music in a room
now everything is cross-marketing
its about sunglasses and shoes
or guns and drugs
you choose

we got it rehashed
we got it half-assed
we're digging up all the graves
and we're spitting on the past
and you can choose between the colors
of the lipstick on the whores
cause we know the difference between
the font of 20% more
and the font of teriakiyi
you tell me
how does it...make you feel?
you tell mewhat's ...real?

and they say that alcoholics are always alcoholics
even when they're as dry as my lips for years
even when they're stranded on a small desert island
with no place within 2,000 miles to buy beer
and i wonder
is he different?
is he different?
has he changed?
what's he about?...
or is he just a liar with nothing to lie about?

Am i headed for the same brick wall
is there anything i can do aboutanything at all?
except go back to that corner in Manhattan
and dig deeper, dig deeper this time

down beneath the impossible pain of our history
beneath unknown bones
beneath the bedrock of the mystery
beneath the sewage systems and the path train
beneath the cobblestones and the water mains
beneath the traffic of friendships and street deals
beneath the screeching of kamikaze cab wheels
beneath everything i can think of to think about
beneath it all, beneath all get out

beneath the good and the kind and the stupid and the cruel

there's a fire just waiting for fuel
there's a fire just waiting for fuel
there's a fire just waiting for fuel
there's a fire just waiting for fuel
there's a fire just waiting for fuel
there's a fire just waiting for fuel
there's a fire just waiting for fuel
there's a fire just waiting for fuel
there's a fire just waiting for fuel
there's a fire just waiting for fuel
there's a fire just waiting for fuel
there's a fire just waiting for fuel
there's a fire just waiting for fuel
there's a fire just waiting for fuel

Kucinich for President

2006-12-13T11:35:00.000-05:00

The Great Turning Continues...

Announcement of Candidacy for President of the United States

Dear Friend,

We are living in a time of great tests of our humanity, which also present great opportunities for transformation. The war in Iraq is a veil that shrouds our creativity and our potential for prosperity. It cuts us off from the world at a time when it is imperative that we acknowledge our interdependence and interconnectedness.

This is a moment with a profound feeling of destiny. America has been an extraordinary international power to manifest that which we focus our energies upon. This power is true of individuals as well as nations.

In a way, when we focus on terror, we bring to ourselves that which we fear. We focused on terror in Iraq and paradoxically helped to create the circumstances, which have propelled Iraq into civil war and chaos.
The prestigious Lancet report on excess casualties in Iraq estimates that the war in Iraq has caused 655,000 Iraqi deaths, and that 20% of those deaths are a direct result of the actions of coalition forces.

This war sacrifices the lives of innocent Iraqis, the lives of our troops, and the physical resources and good will of our nation. We are sacrificing our financial future, borrowing money from Beijing to occupy Baghdad in a war that military generals and the Iraqi Study Group have concluded is impossible to win militarily.

We are focusing our resources on the power of destruction rather than the vision of a world in which we want to live: A world of prosperity and peace, equity, beauty and justice. It is time for us to stand together to bring the troops home and stand by the people of Iraq through implementing a real policy for the security, recovery, reconciliation and restoration of their nation.

We as a nation have the opportunity to embrace the challenges of our time and take a new direction, starting with ending the war in Iraq. The leaders of my party have said that they will not stop funding the war, and are openly supporting a supplementary appropriations bill for an additional one hundred and sixty billion dollars ($160,000,000,000), on top of the $70,000,000,000 that was appropriated to Iraq for financial year 2007, back in October of this year. This would bring war expenditure for 2007 to $230 billion, double the expenditure of 2006, and by far the largest appropriation of the war so far.

Today, I announced my candidacy for President of the United States in a quest to call my party to courage and integrity on this issue. This is a journey upon which I hope you will join together with me to ensure that our country calls forth our great potential with the same courage of our forefathers and mothers who birthed the vision for our great nation.

Our campaign will change the direction of the Democratic Party, the war in Iraq and our nation.

Please join me to help make this great turning possible.

Thank you

Dennis Kucinich

Left Behind Goes Video

2006-12-11T21:33:00.000-05:00

Because Jesus felt there just wasn't enough blood and gore, or spiritual rigor, in Streetfighter and Grand Theft Auto.

Real Voices from Iraq, via Dahr Jamail

2006-12-11T20:02:00.000-05:00

I've run out of words. -KW

Sphinx in the Sands

2006-12-11T19:48:00.000-05:00

"Military force is the new impotence, but we will flail away, preferring death to diplomacy. This course keeps us stuck in Iraq, while guaranteeing Iran's going nuclear."

Honor

2006-12-07T22:00:00.001-05:00

The Kucinich Exit Plan

2006-12-07T21:40:00.000-05:00

Mourning

2006-12-05T13:31:00.000-05:00

Published on Monday, December 4, 2006 by the Boston Globe

Mourning the Hidden Tragedy in Iraq
by Beverly Beckham

Adam is my prism. I look at life through his eyes. He is 20 months old, and everything is new to him. And so far, everything is good. He's loved. He's healthy. He sees the world as a safe place. I know the world isn't safe. And it scares me sometimes, the difference between what he sees and what I know.

Life is fragile. It's why we swaddle infants, and put bumper pads in cribs and seat belts in cars and inoculate against disease. It's why parents don't sleep some nights, many nights, worrying about all that can go wrong.
Adam is my youngest daughter's child, a happy little boy. In 16 years, I wonder, will he be a soldier fighting a war in some far-off place most of us can't find on a map? Will he be ducking bullets and bombs in a town we can't pronounce? Will he lose the legs he runs on, the hands that build Lego towers, the arms he wraps around his mother's neck? I rock him to sleep some nights and tell him happy stories. Am I lying to him by weaving tales?

My best friend's son is fighting in Iraq. He is her baby. Another friend's two sons are in Iraq. They are her babies. Everyone is someone's baby. It takes a lifetime to grow them and only seconds to lose them. And we're losing them while we're shopping, while we're watching TV, while we're listening to the radio and planning our day.

Earl T. Hecker is a trauma surgeon who was stationed in Landstuhl, Germany. He's one of 29 American servicemen who speak about the war in a new book: "What Was Asked of Us -- An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It," compiled by Canadian journalist Trish Wood. Hecker talks about the 30,000 injured Americans. "I've been to Normandy. I've been to Flanders Fields. I've been to all these places. The soldiers are dead. They're dead. But this is an injury war. . . . Soldiers in Iraq are surviving horrific injuries. . . . Right now it's absolutely hidden. I don't think most people think about these kids at all. Out of sight, out of mind."

The Iraq war has been out of sight. It's like an art house movie. You have to make an effort to see it, and it's mainly been the participant s' families and friends who've been watching. America's preoccupation has not been the war. It's been the latest action-packed adventure -- James Bond this week, somebody else next week -- because war is grim, Sunnis and Shiites are confusing, and no one likes reading subtitles.

"Who's the prime minister of Iraq? Who's the president of Iraq? When did we assault Fallujah? A lot of people died during those times." People should know these things. This is what Benjamin Flanders, New Hampshire Army National Guard, says in this book that should be a bestseller but isn't because we're not lining up to read about the war, either.

The veterans who sat down and talked to Wood are only a handful of the roughly 1 million soldiers who've served in Iraq. They talked individually in "long, emotional interviews" about their lack of knowledge: "We were handed a book about as thick as a wallet, a little green book on Iraq, and that was our knowledge of the country we were about to enter."

They talked about trust gained and then lost: "November '03 was about the six-month period for us, and we hadn't yet provided adequate water, sewerage, and electricity to the Iraqis. So all of a sudden, we were no longer 'America the liberator.' Now we're the invaders who can't supply what we're supposed to be giving them."

They talked about shooting the enemy: "Normally we aim for an area called the triangle of death. It's an area around the mouth region in the chin where a shot is designed to separate your spine from your head, rendering the person completely paralyzed."

They talked about their lack of equipment: "We should have had way more armor on the Humvees." They talked about Iraq's dirt. If an explosion is close enough, "it cuts you off from the rest of your guys, so you don't know if they got hit or not because there's a big dust cloud." And they talked about the heat, the fear, the bureaucracy, the camaraderie, and how the war changed them. "When I got wounded, I was on my second tour of Iraq. I was hit by an IED" -- an improvised explosive device -- "and ended up losing both my legs."

Adam is my prism. I see him in every soldier. I wish I didn't.

"I think that the loss of life that we've had is tragic. The loss of the Iraqi people is tragic. But I'm going to look back to the good that we were able to do when we were there. . . . We had a program called Operation Adopt an Iraqi Village. We had thousands of boxes of stuff come over from all over the country. . . . We were able to make some people pretty happy, and some children very happy."

I watch Adam play and think about the man he will become. And I hope that war isn't in his future.

Beverly Beckham can be reached at bbeckham@globe.com.

Land Trusts

2006-12-03T23:41:00.001-05:00

Nancy Pelosi's Priorities are Mixed Up. Call her.

2006-12-01T22:09:00.000-05:00

This Nation piece by William Greider is further evidence that the post-election break is over for progressives.

I'm more convinced than ever that the major religion of America is not Christianity. It's Capitalism - just as much an unfounded matter of blind faith as any other religion, and with adherents just as convinced of its utter infallibility. Perhaps the appeal of Islam - a religion growing in these secular times - is that it's the only religion with any followers, though they are a tiny, violent fraction of a largely peaceful spiritual community, capable of even getting the attention of the Capitalist high priests and priestesses.

If you'd like to use a less violent means of getting some attention for those who believe there's more to life than profit share, Nancy Pelosi's phone number is (415) 556-4862 in San Francisco and (202) 225-4965 in Washington D.C. Please call and giver her an earful. Repeatedly. -KW

Same Old Same Old
by William Greider

House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi ought to find a quiet place where she can sit down and recount the election. She was not chosen by her friends in Silicon Valley or by the friendly investment bankers on both coasts. They no doubt contributed generously to the party's candidates. But her House majority was made possible by millions of fed-up Americans ready to gamble that Democrats might try something new--on Iraq, on the soggy economy for working people and other grievances.

So why does Pelosi begin the education of her freshman members with a seminar on Rubinomics? Robert Rubin, the Citigroup executive and former Treasury secretary, will appear solo next week before the party caucus to explain the economy. Pelosi has scheduled another caucus briefing on Iraq, but that includes five expert voices of varying viewpoints. Rubin gets the stage to himself.

When labor officials heard about this, they asked to be included since they have very different ideas about what Democrats need to do in behalf of struggling workers and middle-class families. Pelosi decided against it. This session, her spokesman explains, is only about "fiscal responsibility," not globalization and trade, not the deterioration of wages and disappearing jobs. Yet those subjects are sure to come up for discussion. Rubin gets to preach his "free trade" dogma with no one present to rebut his facts and theories.

A fundamental debate is growing within the party around these economic issues and Pelosi knows this. It is seriously unwise for this new Speaker to leave an impression she has already chosen sides. The interpretation by Washington insiders will be: Pelosi is "safe;" she is not going to threaten Rubin's Wall Street orthodoxy. Far-flung voters will begin to conclude Democrats are the same-old, same-old money party. This is the sort of party "unity" that can earn Pelosi a very short honeymoon.

Young People For

2006-12-01T21:47:00.000-05:00

Martin Luther King Jr.

2006-11-30T19:43:00.000-05:00

An excerpt from his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize Lecture:

"...So man's proneness to engage in war is still a fact. But wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war. In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space and guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in war. A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil, and spiritual disillusionment. A world war - God forbid! - will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to ultimate death. So if modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno such as even the mind of Dante could not imagine..."

Gardens for Plainfield

2006-11-28T13:42:00.000-05:00

A children's story I've been mulling for awhile. I hope to make collage illustrations and submit it to a children's book publisher sometime soon. -KW

Marisa lives in Plainfield, New Jersey, with her mother, Elena, her father, Paul, and her baby brother Sam. She lives on the third floor of an apartment building with four stories and many families, and also many balconies where people put pots of flowers and herbs to bask in the sun.

Marisa and her family go to church at the First Unitarian Society of Plainfield. Once a month, the church has a food pantry, to give out bags of rice, noodles and canned goods to their neighbors who have a hard time earning enough money to buy food.

Three times every year, Marisa, her mother and father and many other grown-ups and kids at the church get together to cook hot meals for the neighbors. They peel mountains of sweet potatoes and stem box after box of kale, collard and other greens. They mix big bowls of cornbread batter and cook the bread in the shiny ovens. People bring cooked turkeys and apple pies, and pounds of coffee are put to percolate in the big coffeepot.

When everything is ready, and the scents of coffee, baking cornbread and glazed sweet potato mingle in the warm air, the people come in and eat as much as they want, for as long as they want. The big kids bring bread and butter to each table and the little kids dance and stomp around under everyone’s feet. In the kitchen, the grown-ups put dirty dishes in the dishwasher and then open the door to a cloud of steam to pull out the clean plates. Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, every year.

One Christmas, while she was watching the people eat, Marisa started thinking about the pots of flowers and herbs on everybody’s balconies. She got an idea, and the idea got stuck in her head. Gardens for Plainfield!

Elena and Paul liked the idea, and helped Marisa write a plan and take it to the City Council.

The City Council liked the idea and set aside some money for seeds and tools.

The neighbors liked the idea, and walked around their houses and apartment buildings, marking out sunny spots with Popsicle sticks and string. They found 57 places to put new gardens to grow fresh fruits and vegetables.

By early March, seven weeks before the last frost, Marisa and her neighbors were ready to dig. They had a digging party, and served lemonade and cookies to everyone who helped.

Every Saturday for the six weeks before the last frost, they had seedling fiestas in the Parish Hall. They spread newspaper on the floor and brought in big bags of dirt and planted dozens of trays of lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, potatoes, peas, cucumbers, green peppers, tomatoes, basil, onions, radishes, lima beans, green beans, kale, collard, chard, parsley, eggplant, dill, cauliflower, celery, cantaloupes, watermelons, honeydews, spinach, sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, asparagus, strawberries, carrots, garlic, zucchini, chives, marjoram, and sage.

One Saturday, Marisa’s neighbor Bill came into church and whispered an idea to Marisa. Marisa whispered it to Elena, who whispered it to Paul and pretty soon everyone in the neighborhood began looking for extra sunny spots to plant fruit bushes and fruit trees: raspberries, blueberries, currants, blackberries, apples, peaches and pears.

Finally, Planting Day arrived, and the whole downtown was filled with streamers, balloons, and people with muddy knees and muddy hands holding muddy trowels. Kids pulled the seedling flats from garden to garden in their little red wagons, and some of the teenagers set up their bands and played music on the street corners.

All that first summer, everyone checked all the gardens. Never before have gardens been so well watered and weeded! People collected jars for canning, and big pots, and made a schedule for the church stove at harvest time. They dug root cellars, and found a room to store seeds, and collected books for a gardening library. They started up compost piles to get ready for nourishing the garden plots in the fall.

They planned a giant Harvest Festival for the first weekend in October. The Mayor gave a speech. The City Council chair cut a ribbon at the first garden plot to be harvested.
Day after day, baskets of tomatoes and cucumbers and melons and every other sort of fruit and vegetable came into the church in the little red wagons, and came out again in boxes filled with rows and rows of shiny glass jars filled with tomato sauce, pickles, apple butter, sliced peaches, a whole rainbow of foods.

At the end of November, Marisa and her family came to a different kind of Thanksgiving Dinner at their church – a potluck. Everyone brought something to share – from fresh bread to apple pies to green bean casseroles to spaghetti and tomato sauce.

And everyone ate, as much as they wanted, for as long as they wanted.

The End.